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So now every data center will have run their own wires? The city will be covered in transmission towers, wires, substations. To place new transmission wires, they’ll have to cut down some forest or demolish something.
The change here is that the data center will pay the full cost of the upgrade.
Which makes me think of publicly owned data centers. Interesting thought
[1] https://cardinalnews.org/2025/01/21/virginia-now-imports-mor...
Sometimes is hard to understand what really happens for me. So regular people compete on price with companies? That is wild. Here the industry in general is the first one to get disconnected from power if there is not enough. This also creates an incentive for people with money to solve the power generation problem that they themselves created.
Virginia also has a tax on electricity, targetting data centers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertszczerba/2026/07/13/power... I'm not sure what the status is, getting hard to find out amid so much noise & public coverage that's just blathering heads mostly, but, for the longest time & in many places, data centers were getting charged at industrial rates for power, which is intentionally kept super low to encourage…
They're getting that at those vastly discounted industrial rates. Meanwhile, their utilities are getting ready to foist nearly $20B of works to bring in about that same 2-3GW in from elsewhere because of capacity issues onto all their customers, residential and commercial alike.
Virginia also has a tax on electricity, targetting data centers. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertszczerba/2026/07/13/power... I'm not sure what the status is, getting hard to find out amid so much noise & public coverage that's just blathering heads mostly, but, for the longest time & in many places, data centers were getting charged at industrial rates for power, which is intentionally kept super low to encourage…
There's nuance of course, but in VA, in one county, 37 data centers account for 3GW of power. They're getting that at those vastly discounted industrial rates. Meanwhile, their utilities are getting ready to foist nearly $20B of works to bring in about that same 2-3GW in from elsewhere because of capacity issues onto all their customers, residential and commercial alike.
There's some good books on this rise too. Internet Alley, for example, https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516686/internet-alley/
Sometimes is hard to understand what really happens for me. So regular people compete on price with companies? That is wild. Here the industry in general is the first one to get disconnected from power if there is not enough. This also creates an incentive for people with money to solve the power generation problem that they themselves created.
Agriculture pays, on average, probably something like 1/1000th of what residential users pay for water.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They already do that. It's just that things like large data centers... actually pay a lot of property taxes. A huge amount compared to their land use. While not really consuming a lot of government services. A building that just needs you to run a transmission line to it once and then sits there unassumingly while paying a disproportionate amount of property tax is the sort of thing municipalities generally offer sig…
You're already describing a race to the bottom there IMHO. Cities or even countries underbid each other to get the golden goose, and then realise they've already bargained away any share of the eggs, and it turns out the goose still shits everywhere.
Obviously it's also possible to make a poor choice and provide more in incentives than you get from having the thing, but in that case they're bidding too low and are only suffering the consequences of their own incompetence.