There are two simultaneous problems that I've come to understand with datacenters and the people that live in their proximity:
1. Somehow the public is always left holding the bag for increased transmission costs despite the cause of the increase being a single (or short list) of outliers.
2. The residential public, as is tradition, is always asked to scale down for industrial demand.
How can we imagine expanding a system that results in both of these outcomes? That, to me, seems to be the thing to fix first.
This is the same issue for water in California as well. Growing water thirsty crops in a desert to use an allocation while average people are asked to conserve.
Transferring wealth from the young and poor to the old and wealthy is the entire purpose of our government.
This is now the endpoint we are bouldering towards: the bottom 90% increasingly have nothing left to steal or exploit. And just like an algal bloom that eventually runs out of oxygen and dies, this is where this system and our society unravels.
No... we are specifically transferring it from the young. This is happening across the west. Once birth control was created, we kicked off a ticking time bomb of a crisis by not actually changing our social safety nets, with fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks.
At the same time, our entire housing shortage is designed to enrich the homeowners by protecting the value of their property at the expense of the young who live with a zero-sum shortage, when previous generations could typically buy a home at, or near, the cost of construction.
We need to be honest that while yes, we are transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, we are also transferring wealth from the young to the old.
It's very obviously not the total number of people that matters. It's the difference in the number of people being funded and doing the funding. The math is fairly straightforward:
# of Boomers - Greatest Gen > Millennials - Boomers
This means that Millennials will have a greater burden than Boomers did. Which means Millennials will live with fewer resources.
Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security. That age can vary but let's pick 65 as a typical retirement age.
I worry that someone here who can't follow a simple a population delta mapping from one generation to another isn't exactly arguing in good faith.
>Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security.
No, we are talking about the previous net contributors (vs receivers) -- that is Boomers vs Greatest Gen in the 1980s -- versus the current net contributors (vs receivers), e.g. Millennials vs Boomers now.
That number has gone down dramatically, and because of that, social security is effectively insolvent.
>Under the current structure, the Social Security Administration estimates that Social Security will pay full benefits until 2033, when it will be forced to reduce benefits by about 23%.
The reason why it's insolvent now is that the relative number of payment contributors to payment receivers has gone down dramatically. Today there are "fewer young people per old person" than there were in previous generations.
And because poor people don’t have much money, the government decided it could borrow heavily from future generations and give it to rich ppl, making them even poorer.
The reality is that these data centers make money for billionaire douchebags.
And unlike the billionaire douchebags of yesteryear they don't invest in the local economy. NOTHING IS TRICKLING DOWN
In fact our modern billionaire douchebags love talking about how much they hate humanity.
The idea that capitalism off loads the cost of externalities onto the unwitting public is nothing new. This is just the most recent and obvious version. Air anbd water pollution are the old ones. They make the pollution and the public pays for it with superfund sites or increased health care costs.
The solution is having the consumer pay for the externalities when they use the product. But this would make AI so much more expensive. When you use AI you are exploiting other people. Just keep that in mind.
It's the tired pattern of absolving the direct bad actors (the corpos themselves), as well as corrupt regulators who give them a pass, in favor of diffusing the responsibility onto individuals. If we're talking about collective action to solve the problem, it should be more of the form of demanding regulation that directly stops the bad actors, rather than this nonsensical fallacy from the same vein as "voting with our wallets".
Absolutely not. The default economic system is anarchy, also known as sharing and mutual aid. You see this even in the reddest of US states, where disaster victims help each other, and a huge pastime is sharing food via potlucks. But all evidence points to anarchical/egalitarian cultures as the baseline mechanism of human organization from prehistory.
Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems, because there is no hierarchical separation between producer and consumer. You can't push off costs to some members of the community when they have equal power to retaliate in kind, and there is no incentive to do so.
Sure they do. I do a thing, it benefits me but causes a problem for my neighbor in the process, I say "oh well fuck him", that's a textbook externality.
> they have equal power to retaliate in kind
A convenient fiction often engaged in by proponents of anarchy. In practice if you compare pairs of people at random you will find almost none that can reasonably be described as equal. Equality is something imposed by the law in an attempt to improve our lives on average.
Anarchy lasts exactly as long as it takes people to start banding together and no longer.
This is what people say when they have no idea what people mean by the POLITICAL system of Anarchism (Libertarian Socialism).
Anarchism, the political system, is not "chaos". That is propaganda that started during the 1930's. If you want to learn about it, real the Anarchist FAQ.
(I have a degrees in American History and Economics if that matters).
Anarchism means "without hierarchy". This how humans organized until the populations of sedentary agricultural communities exploded. I will argue, and keep arguing despite downvotes, that anarchism has the least impedance mismatch with human nature out of every system, because it was the status quo before civilization became the norm.
How will this be fixed when the public doesn’t have any power to make changes, and politicians are bribed—i.e., lobbied—by all these companies building data centers?
from the article: "NV Energy plans to end its contract with Liberty in May 2027, citing growing demand and its own resource constraints."
the "growing demand" is the AI datacenters (the linked story goes into detail). it's the direct result, so while it might feel soothing that this other story doesnt actually mention "AI" it's mostly just an omission.
(edit) the issue is that there's a sudden tight timeline and yes as other comments mention it's too bad the issue wasn't addressed sooner, but that's not very unusual when there's no major impetus to force a change. and that whether or not AI/LLM is a net good for society (I literally have Claude writing code for me as I type this), the energy issue is one that seems to be a real one (unlike the water issue which mostly seems to be not so real).
the town^H^H^H^H region (edit) is already in the process of expanding their infrastructure to get power from elsewhere so things will be "fine", but this is a terrible time to have a government that is rabidly cancelling non-fossil energy projects as fast as possible.
Tahoe is not a town. It is a region containing many towns. Most of it will continue to have power (mostly through NV Energy). This is a single utility that has failed to plan for this planned transition for 17 years. Invoking the data center bogeyman for political sympathy is the only thing going on here. Liberty has failed repeatedly to address this problem for nearly two decades and it's beyond time they were cut loose. I have sympathy for the people who have to suffer from their failure but this is not NV Energy's fault nor is it related to data centers at all: NV energy has been rapidly expanding capacity faster than growth in consumption and has 19 active geothermal plants in the area with more on the way as well as wind and solar.
I have no problem with new datacenters being built, but if the Fortune article is to be believed, it's that the suddenly tight timeline is due to the rapid increase in need for these facilities.
my post is more about how we really need to be seeking energy sources from all possible corners, and we have a government that is literally paying billions to contractors to cancel wind projects.
If AI is the cause of these data centers, why is it not the bogey man? This sounds like you personally want to use AI with out acknowledging the externalities and the burden your use of AI puts on your fellow citizens.
This is an interesting problem. I have been wanting to dig deeper on some of the complaints around water and power. This one is unique though.
Doesn’t read much like a problem so much with data center growth as it does with Liberty mismanaging their business/assets. For almost 20 years liberty acted as nothing more than a transmission operator with very weak agreements on power generation. They should have been figuring out this problem long ago.
I would think that a lot of rural electrical cooperatives are "nothing more than a transmission operator" i.e. they own/manage/maintain the lines from their providers out to their customers, but don't have the capital or expertise to run generating plants.
“nothing more than a transmission operator with very weak agreements on power generation” don’t take the quote out of context now.
I would bet most coops have fairly concrete contracts on generation. This one is unique because they were using usage from a grid they have no standing in. Weak agreement, folks should have been figuring it out 20 years ago.
If the residents of Tahoe owned their electricity provider, we wouldn't be having this problem. This was the norm up utnil the late 20th century and then we started selling off all the utilities for "efficiency". These public-private "partnerships" (or just straight privatization with a regulated industry) allow investors to keep profits while pushing losses onto the public.
Private equity is getting into utilities because it's a captive market, the service is highly inelastic and the owners are generally allowed to push all capex onto customer bills without recourse.
So your "interesting problem" is simply not seeing this as what it is: profit extraction.
The Tahoe area has very strong NIMBYism regulations making it effectively impossible to build power plants in the area.
It's not just a Liberty Utilities problem. Other nearby utilities, like TDPUD are in the same boat, only buying electricity and not generating it, and they are publicly owned.
Don’t start throwing private equity as another scape goat. This is more of a regulatory gap than anything. They pay CPUC rates but NV is effectively their grid. This is definitely in the wheelhouse of Liberty and Lake Tahoe residents should have been figuring out the issue.
This is like the movie Chinatown, where people were fighting over water, but now it's all about electricity.
It sounds like Lake Tahoe residents kicked the can down the road and didn't care about electricity for so long that now they have to pay the piper. I think it's entire just that they have to bear the costs of their own electricity.
What exactly am I supposed to do as a resident to change how a state government regulated utility operates? Please respond with something other than "Vote", which I already do.
Sometimes it's mostly about taking an interest, reading or understand the legislation, and making a really good case and argument to the government.
I don't think I can claim credit because I'm sure I wasn't the only one, but it took 3 or 4 emails to a couple of legislator offices to get some policy changes. In my case it might've just been small enough (no news coverage, basically only a small number of people were aware of a regulatory memo), the first time or two they just kicked the can down the road deferring the implementation, until ultimately they reversed course. And my part was just laying out a very strong case for why the particular situation was unfair, how many people would be impacted (voters), etc. Nothing confrontational, just laying out the argument.
Blogs, newsletters, websites are nearly zero dollars per month cost. Expose their corruption via 1st amendment rights and get others to vote them out with you.
1) Boycott the products and share the idea with others.
2) Show up to town meetings BEFORE these data centers come.
3) Organize! This is the most important. Yes, voting does not matter, but being a loud constituency does.
Boycott what products? I can't boycott my electricity. There is only one provider.
Re #2) I am a tahoe resident and these data centers aren't in my towns. They are far away. I'm not blaming the data centers for these problems, I just disagree with OP that "Tahoe residents kicked the can down the road". Many of us just go to work, take care of our families, and pay our electric bill. Just not sure how this is our fault.
I've noticed there's a pattern of behavior with folks living in the forested parts of California where they expect everyone else to subsidize their impractical choice on where to put a house.
Extreme wildfire risks? let everyone else shoulder the cost, don't deny our fire insurance.
Power delivery infra costs (and associated risks, see wildfires)? don't make us actually pay for this, we're all in this together guys!
Few years ago everybody was talking about the inadequacies of our aging electricity distribution infrastructure and how it was a shame it wasn't being fixed and the risks it entails.
Now folks are wailing about the terrible AI come for our electricity and how awful the burden of the upgrades are.
When the upgrades were for solar they were good, when upgrades are for AI they're bad. It's almost like people just want to complain about anything associated with something they don't like regardless of relevance.
Why should locals be happy that someone is building AI data centers?
I can understand it for the country as a whole. AI is a last desperate gamble for the US to stay relevant and fight of China. But then maybe the federal government should start paying for it.
I mean EVs are a change in power source, with an increase in energy efficiency even. AI is a brand new massive energy draw that isn't really reducing much elsewhere, and with a huge question mark over how much value it brings to the vast majority of the population.
I'd say the people complaining about AI likely see EVs as having some utility. While AI may have some utility, the amount of resources invested seems to make it more of a ponzi scheme waiting to pop.
It's weird to read an article about how AI is ruining Lake Tahoe, with a map illustrating the problem, when the map itself has the world's most generic "100% generated by Claude" UI ever.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the article using the Claude map. It's just deeply funny somehow.
I'd love for us to get away from this trope of ever-increasing umbrella categories that you are discouraged from criticizing if you participate in it, very commonly marked by usage of the term "funny"/"hilarious" to imply hypocrisy.
The world is big and complicated. "AI" is the biggest umbrella category we have ever seen in modern civilization. There's nothing inherently wrong with criticizing AI while using AI. There's nothing inherently wrong with criticizing a country while living in that country. There's nothing inherently wrong with criticizing a company while using that company's service. Etc.
"Hypocrisy!" is a favorite accusation of those with the same-but-opposite bias as the one they are calling out. It's the easiest attack to construct, because you can point to anything and omit the complication of reality.
And people are hypocritical! That's part of why it's such an easy thing to claim. But it's also the reason you need a stronger argument than just stating the claim. You need to separate yourself from the endless sea of low-quality internet snipes that rely on simple accusations of hypocrisy.
Disagree strongly - reasonable people can hold different beliefs, and being able to accept that is an important part of being able to discuss issues reasonably, but if someone's actions show the opposite of how they say the world should be for others...
That's especially the case for incredibly optional things like choosing to generate an AI image or buying from a company that the buyer says is immoral. (I don't include moving from a country in the incredibly optional category.)
I think hypocrisy is perhaps one of the most useful criticisms we have to evaluate others in terms of whether they sincerely hold the beliefs they espouse -- for example, if a politician or entertainer says "Everyone should not do x", maybe that's a sincerely-held belief that we should respect. But if we then find out that politician or entertainer was actually doing x, maybe it's not actually a sincerely-held belief we should respect their views about.
For US readers, like if <Dem or GOP party> said "Politician X is bad for Y reason" but we then find out the accusing party was actually doing Y, is there any stronger indicator about whether their espoused beliefs were at least sincerely-held, regardless of whether we disagreed with the view?
> And people are hypocritical!
"And people are <___>" could be said about most other illegal or frequently-criticized behaviors -- and would especially be the case if the consequences for the other behaviors were only as bad as the "consequences" faced for hypocrisy. But that doesn't mean we should avoid criticizing those other behaviors for that reason.
Sometimes I think the world would be a much better place if people consciously realized the human psyche made the "Availability" choice in terms of CAP theorem.
Are most people really using it a lot in private? As someone not working in programming, neither I nor 95% of my friends and family purposefully use AI for anything. And the few that do use it mostly use it as a wikipedia replacement.
Like if I needed some throw away generic art I might use it, so maybe a few times a year. And some searches will give me ai results to read before I can scroll to click wikipedia. But if that cost me anything, required a free login, or even had to scroll past a wiki or research link, I would just keep going to wikipedia.
Specific jobs benefit a lot from AI, but the general population? I still find it questionable if people will benefit or even want to use ai commonly.
I'd rather the AI providers bear the cost of the externalities they inflict on the world.
If the cost to users is reasonable with that added burden I'll happily pay it. If it is not viable without passing costs on society, then they should not be in business.
On mobile the map prevents the user from scrolling down, you need to drag the padding area instead. Google maps embed doesn't have this issue as it requires two fingers to pan.
Isn't this just a false dichotomy in web comic form? Implying that there are only two options, full participant or complete withdrawal from society, as a means of suggesting that one cannot apply morals to how one chooses to engage with society.
But in reality, there are many many ways to engage in society, some more or less ethical/moral than others, and one is free to criticize individual choices.
Even if we consider something like social media, there is still a range of choices other than fully engaging in social media and rejecting all social media. There are attempts to use it responsible, limiting and curating use to less harmful versions while attempt to get most of the benefit, while still postulating that the overall effect of the average use case of social media is harming society.
It feels a lot like saying that, since it is impossible to live a perfectly ethical/moral life, ethics and morals can be completely ignored without regard for what options one does have available to them.
That's subjective my friend. The fact that you draw an opinion doesn't make it more valid. I think there's merit to confronting people on high horses to their own lies.
Hypocrites just can’t let go of this comic. They love it. It’s like they have one thing that they hold onto for dear life. I don’t think they’ll ever stop posting it lol
It will be hilarious if Google built a data center in Nevada only to run Incline Village out of power (where Sergey Brin pretends to live as a tax dodge).
> where Sergey Brin pretends to live as a tax dodge
It's not just Brin who lives there. The median wealth of that town is at least 10x everywhere around it. It's the closest city in Nevada to the Bay Area. Back before California changed the law, if you had stock options you earned in CA and then moved to NV before you sold them, you could avoid paying income tax. Or if you sold your company.
I know multiple people who moved to Incline right before vesting or selling. They would come back to the Bay Area each weekend to see their wife and kids and work remotely during the week. As long as they spent more than 1/2 their time in NV they didn't have to pay CA tax.
CA has since closed that loophole -- if you earn it in CA they will come for the tax even if you live in another state when you sell it. But for the last 20+ years, it was a tax strategy that a lot of people used.
I didn’t realize the scale of data centers in northern Nevada. Residential customers will mostly pay 70% for the transmission line costs. 12 data centers by 2033 with 5,900 MW of power.
“NV Energy is building Greenlink West, a 525-kV, $4.2 billion transmission line from Las Vegas to Yerington, expected online in May 2027. Schwarzrock said Liberty would be “first in the waiting line” when Greenlink opens, giving it access to a wider pool of energy providers. But that timeline matches the contract deadline exactly, leaving almost no margin for error. About 70% of the project’s costs will be borne by Southern Nevada customers.
But this is nothing new, at least according to NV Energy.”
I didn’t realize the scale of data centers in northern Nevada.
I also find it hard to wrap my head around the scale involved. Right now I'm putting together a home server with 4x GPUs. Never having worked with a real server chassis before, I didn't really think the logistics through. It weighs over 100 pounds and requires two people to move. It had to be delivered on a pallet and unloaded with a forklift, way too big for UPS. Takes up my whole desk at the moment. Needs a 220V 30A outlet. If I stuffed it full of RTX6000s, it would draw about 6 kW.
And this article talks about a 6 GW project, so that's... a million of these giant power-slurping boat anchors.
There's a similar data center project in Utah which is also causing a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. That one is 9 GW. 1.5 million huge-ass (to me) 4U servers. This just seems nuts.
A lot of these types of AI complaints feel like blaming a pothole for cracking your windshield in half even though you've been driving around with it full of chips and micro cracks for years. It's certainly exacerbated the issue to a point where it's impossible to ignore now but the warning signs have been there for years- utilities and municipalities failing to secure power and water resources for future residents, companies engaging in mass layoffs only for the stock prices to climb. AI adoption aggravated the symptoms, the root causes remain the same.
I think it's more that our governments only leap to patch up some of those chips and cracks when big biz rolls thru, even though "the little guy" has been raising it as an issue for decades.
But then again, democracy absolutely fails in that you have to already be rich to be a politician most of the time and people tend to vote extremely tribally by party rather than on policies (lest they accidentally vote for the wrong party!)
The truth is in many democracies none of the parties are prepared to do what needs to be done most of the time, nor is the average voter prepared to accept any form of compromise or abstain from uninformed, knee-jerk and tribally motivated reactions to proposed policy.
I don't think it's that clear of a delineation especially in situations like this with utilities and governments wrestling over regulations. I believe that a lot of the folks who have been in the drivers seat and ignored the chips in the windshield that is the fabric of our society are happy to have something to direct blame towards no matter their affiliations or underlying beliefs about how resources ought to be managed, or even their own attitudes about AI usage.
i understand your point, however your "driver's seat" metaphor blurs the accountability of political representation IMO. Are voters in the "driver's seat"? Local governments?
What I see as a valuable point is that federal governments with subsidies that "distort" markets for public goods and externality regulation, worsen the "tragedy of the commons".
Explaining many things to a naive person, or a kid, boils down to this type of issue, you can even extend it to nation states.
Without experience of violence, most people would intuitively understand that a "competition" between governments is problematic.
I really disagree with the idea that goverment subsidies are either inherently good or bad overall.
Agricultural subsidies are often poorly distributed and managed from corruption and greed, but agricultural subsidies is also the only alternative to the granary system to prevent famine, and the granary system regularly failed and still resulted in famines. Countries with any decent agricultural subsidies however have essencially eliminated famine, despite the low 1-2% profit margins but 30% variations in yearly yield that farms have to weather.
It's because the accountability isn't clear cut. Many hands have touched those levers of power over the last 20 years this specific problem has incubated, not all of them governmental.
I see, maybe I am underestimating local factors and individual responsibility here. After all, democracy depends on people to vote, and wealthy people generally are free to move and can more easily buy property, even if unsafe. So the individual financial or survival risk of relying on "society" (for example, insurance, firefighting, infrastructure etc) also anti-proportional to wealth/ a beach house is not the same as a rented flat or hard-earned small apartment in some precarious space.
Still sounds like an instance of redistribution problems to me.
> utilities and municipalities failing to secure power
To be fair, it's not as if they didn't often try to build more power.
As it turns out, most people don't like having a massive fuel-burning power plant near their homes. Now they don't even like having solar panel fields near their homes. These people often are the same kind to show up at city hall or public utility board meetings and raise a fuss.
Now, are they doing it and returning to houses that take a crapload (I do believe that is the technical term) of energy to heat and cool because of out-of-date windows, insulation, and HVAC controls? Maybe. Are they sometimes also the same people who hated the idea of phasing out incandescent bulbs? Probably. But either way, that power source ain't getting built.
> and water resources
Kansas City, St. Louis, Omaha, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Columbus all sit on major rivers or massive freshwater lakes and aren't in a desert climate. We could do something with that.
as an Arizonan with a rapidly rising water bill because of Colorado River standoffs that one is personal :)
The NIMBY problem is very real especially for an area filled with resorts and vacation homes, but when you have 20 years to figure it out I think there has to be more than that at play. They're ultimately going to fix the problem with a transmission line anyways.
Good. I don't think any electricity should be used for homes. It's wastes resources on people who will soon be economically unviable, and really constrains the data center build-out.
It’s not clear that these high wildfire risk places should be populated. They’re like the flood plains of Texas. I don’t think any utility under CPUC pricing can reasonably supply them for a long time. The price comes out of something: defensible space clearing, lack of power generation contracts, or all this pushed to another vendor.
The vagaries of American politics allow for failure and then bailout as a mechanism for these sorts of situations but I think we can see the writing on the wall. 50k residents at an average million dollars a resident is $50 b so it is not quite possible to have a buyout so I see why we just allow for the decline.
But any more we allow for the place to be inhabited, the greater the risk. Otherwise it’s just an incredibly regressive use of our resources: taxing a lot of working age people in the more urbanized areas to fund wealthy retirees in the forest.
The current tide of California politics favors that and we can do it so long as our economic productivity is powered by tech but a time will come after and it’s better now to do this than after when we will find ourselves unable to sustain productive capacity.
just as a thought experiment, say you're an entrepreneur, how would you solve this problem?
whether it AI, Data Centers, EVs...I'm seeing this problem more and more, we need more energy/power. I'm curious to see what others think are possible viable solutions.
This isn't a problem that can be solved by a clever entrepreneur. This is what government is for. When you have a shared resource that everyone needs, government is the best option for making sure its distribution is fair.
We already know how to solve this: make transmission owned by the government, make generation free-market. Cities do this already. The city of Santa Clara owns all the transmission, and then buys power on the open market along with generating themselves.
The result is their power costs 1/2 as much as all the surrounding cities that have PG&E.
I was actually going to disagree on first glance but I absolutely agree with this.
Transmission has no business edge, you will gain the best economies of scale by having the city (or larger regional) manage it.
Free-market works on the generation side because as prices change, producers can decide to build out more capacity or innovate to gain an edge. I don’t think a single monopoly construct, like the PG&Es of the world, have incentive to innovate and properly serve the market.
And ironically (not really), this setup is more market competitive. Instead of having transmission owned by 1 maybe 2 companies who also monopolize generation, you get a government who just buys the power as cheap as people can make it. There are better incentives on the government owned transmission than on a company owned transmission.
Nuclear has a ton of VC interest right now. Or the robinhood dude with his space beaming stuff.
I think anything you can do to add to the energy mix is worthwhile atm. Does America produce any domestic solar panels? I’m talking wafers not assembly.
I still think decoupling generation from transmission is part of the problem and I don’t know if I love the construct of a single legislated monopoly.
In this specific case, Liberty and constituents should have come up with a plan on the first contract term for generation. Maybe it meant spinning up their own generation plant within CA or NV.
It’s not a popular idea here but I still think energy markets can help solve this problem. If you have multiple producers and a market rate for electricity you can more quickly incentivize new generation and innovation compared to the single operator monopolies that exist.
I'd come up with a variety of ways to interfere with the placement of datacenters, and I'd sell them as a service to people who don't want a datacenter to interfere with their access to water or electricity. This would be, hopfully, absurd enough to make the government realize that they need to step in and make my business model irrelevant.
Entrepreneurs know exactly how to solve this issue: panels, batteries, and wires. But it isn't so simple when you face 20 years of permitting between BLM, USFS, tribes, states, counties, cities, and individual litigation. If you want an example of how bad this is look at the permitting timeline for SunZia in New Mexico and its transmission line to California.
Gas pipelines don't have the same problem because the federal government exercises centralized permitting and eminent domain powers for fossil fuels under a 1938 law, and there is no corresponding statute for electric lines.
You can make a reasonable case for transmission and distribution to be a government operated public utility. But we need aggressive private industry competition on the generation and storage side in order to prevent shortages.
And do those countries have large and rapidly growing demand? A free market is the only reliable way to respond effectively to changing demand signals. Economic central planning always fails over the long term.
> And do those countries have large and rapidly growing demand? A free market is the only reliable way to respond effectively to changing demand signals. Economic central planning always fails over the long term.
It's not the only reliable way.
Also the free market has a bad habit of settling on "most profitable" (in the short-medium term) configurations by sacrificing resiliency.
Pacific Gas and Electric was built by engineers, who had a mandate to transfer huge amounts of power across very large and difficult terrain. When the management in the 1950s post-WWII society had this mandate, they executed amazing feats of engineering with very reliable outcomes. Much later, the very stable and profitable grid attracted a new kind of management, those interested in money. New kind of cost-cutting around maintenance, new kinds of labor relations involving non-union subcontractors, and a lot of advanced financial engineering involving using money to make money, took over from the previous internal culture. This was executed carefully and with a lot of control, and was successful, until the de-regulation of the electricity markets and then Enron.
Within a very short time frame, the previously iron-clad engineering of 1950s PG&E was defeated and failed, under new economic regulation. Read a couple of books about it, there are many.
What was discovered in the emergency proceedings that occurred in California during the California power grid crisis orchestrated by Enron and others, was that the upper management of PG&E had found legal loopholes in their very strict oversight, and were using dubiously declared shell companies to purchase power generating assets across the entire USA. Once those assets were purchased, and out of sight of regulators, more financial engineering took place. But the entire situation was discovered during the blackout hearings.
source: an attorney who worked for Sacramento directly involved in those hearings.
A "free market" is an attractive statement to some, politically, but we are very far down the road already for some of those experiments.
> Economic central planning always fails over the long term.
So do businesses - capitalism has business failure built in and expected. Private industry in energy has failed the public dramatically at times. Economic planning works in many respects - lots of places do fine with roads, energy, healthcare, water, gas, other transport infra (airports, subways, etc.).
The question is, which tool does what well, and how do we apply them? Private industry is good for rapid innovation and development, and for keeping things off the public ledger - smartphones, etc. It isn't good when failure isn't an option, such as police, water, ... look at hospitals, for a current example.
> central planning
These are bogey scare words - what is central about it? It's not a 5 year plan for the entire economy of the entire country.
In the US, power is a public utility. And regulated as such. The providers can be private though and depends a lot on the location.
Personally, I wouldn’t trust my city or county to operate a power plant and transmission lines. I’m happy that power is regulated by my state as a natural monopoly.
SVP delivers over 90% of their energy to commercial customers, making it a bit of a special case. However it does prove the hypothesis that large-scale consumers tend to lower, not raise, the local retail price for energy.
As for SF, there is no real sense in which they are trying to kick out PG&E. While there is and always has been a vocal group of SF residents who want a free pony, when it comes down to paying the bills SF has voted in 12 separate elections to not establish a municipal utility. They have a demonstrated history of failure to invest in their own utilities stretching back 100 years.
That there are city owned utilities doesn't seem to refute any of prepend's statement.
> In the US, power is a public utility.
A city owned utility is both a public utiliy because it offers a utility service to the public and a public utility because it is municipally owned.
> And regulated as such.
I expect Burbank W&P is regulated by the CPUC, same as other power utilities that operate in California.
> The providers can be private though and depends a lot on the location.
Many providers are private; this one isn't, and it depends on the location.
> Personally, I wouldn’t trust my city or county to operate a power plant and transmission lines. I’m happy that power is regulated by my state as a natural monopoly.
This is, like prepend's opinion, man. I assume they are truthfully expressing their trust and happiness. Even if they lived within the service area of Burbank W&P or another municipal power utility, they might not trust it.
As to power being a natural monopoly, it's hard to tell exactly given that it exists in a highly regulated market; but I don't know of any US markets where there is a choice for electrical distribution. You get the utility that serves your property, or you get to pay them to build their network to serve your property, or you get no utility power (and in some locations, no certiticate of occupancy). I'm sure there's some exceptions such as a lot that stradles the service areas or a lot with a high availability use that requirea feeds from multiple substations and it makes more sense to wire to a substation from a neighboring utility. And there's the legacy DC power networks in some old cities. But generally, there's no overbuilding of competing distribution lines; unlike say telecom where many areas have at least two of copper telephone, copper coax cable, and fiber telecom; and often several vendors if you're willing to pay commercial rates for cabling.
Private companies can operate more efficiently offering better service and competitive pricing. How do you not know that privatization is the solution? /s
Sure, ETA for a nuclear power plant is ~15-20 years from now, wind is ~5-10, solar is 2-6, natural gas is 2-4 years. Data centers take 18 - 24 months. Even if build out for power infrastructure needed had started when the demand became apparent (which, it’s not clear that it has done). You should still expect electricity costs to inflate due to the ~100GW of additional demand that has been announced, because there is no way to build the power infrastructure in less time than it takes to build the additional data centers. It’s also not clear that there would be enough elasticity in the supply chain for building any of these generation methods that you even could strike ground on increasing us electricity production by the ~10% needed over the given time frame. The reality is, there is no way to build all the additional data centers without significant inflationary pressure, that will be borne by everyone except the well connected hyperscalers with excellent lobbyists unless average people actually realize that fact and force their dealing with the relevant municipalities and grid operators to be transparent.
Fine! So let's get started then! I don't care about data centers. I don't care about AI. Maybe it's here to stay, maybe it's a passing trend. I care about humans, and human prosperity.
Human prosperity - ours and our grandchildren's - is to a large degree determined by how much power we produce. So let's get started producing more.
The best time to have built a power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
TL;DR Libertarian separatists, who went so far as to name their utility "Liberty Utilities", organized their utility in 2009 under a temporary agreement with Nevada, which was extended twice, and now after almost two decades of failing to invest in their own generating assets they will be deprioritized by their ex-partner.
I see that a sibling comment beat me to it, but "Libertarian separatists"? They're well-organized separatists given they're spread across, what, a couple dozen states? It's quite the narrative you've spun, and it would be almost as interesting if it were true.
Liberty Utilities has nothing to do with libertarian separatists. It's a brand name of Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp, a boring Canadian infrastructure conglomerate that buys regulated water, gas, and electric systems across North America. They bought this chunk of rural California grid from NV Energy in 2009. That's it.
There are two simultaneous problems that I've come to understand with datacenters and the people that live in their proximity:
1. Somehow the public is always left holding the bag for increased transmission costs despite the cause of the increase being a single (or short list) of outliers.
2. The residential public, as is tradition, is always asked to scale down for industrial demand.
How can we imagine expanding a system that results in both of these outcomes? That, to me, seems to be the thing to fix first.
This is the same issue for water in California as well. Growing water thirsty crops in a desert to use an allocation while average people are asked to conserve.
Transferring wealth from the young and poor to the old and wealthy is the entire purpose of our government.
This is now the endpoint we are bouldering towards: the bottom 90% increasingly have nothing left to steal or exploit. And just like an algal bloom that eventually runs out of oxygen and dies, this is where this system and our society unravels.
> the old and wealthy
The government will throw them under the bus in a heartbeat to keep power.
The government would, except that they tend to vote in much greater numbers than other groups, so keeping them happy is important to stay in power.
The success of the YIMBY movement is basically like watching this power shift happen in real time.
*Transferring wealth from the poor to the rich
No... we are specifically transferring it from the young. This is happening across the west. Once birth control was created, we kicked off a ticking time bomb of a crisis by not actually changing our social safety nets, with fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks.
At the same time, our entire housing shortage is designed to enrich the homeowners by protecting the value of their property at the expense of the young who live with a zero-sum shortage, when previous generations could typically buy a home at, or near, the cost of construction.
We need to be honest that while yes, we are transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, we are also transferring wealth from the young to the old.
> fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks
The largest generation by population in the US is Millenials, second largest in Gen Z.
https://www.populationpyramids.org/generations/united-states
It's very obviously not the total number of people that matters. It's the difference in the number of people being funded and doing the funding. The math is fairly straightforward:
# of Boomers - Greatest Gen > Millennials - Boomers
This means that Millennials will have a greater burden than Boomers did. Which means Millennials will live with fewer resources.
I don't follow this comment at all, sorry.
Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security. That age can vary but let's pick 65 as a typical retirement age.
Here's another data source:
https://theworlddata.com/us-population-by-age/
There are 205.7 million working age adults vs. 61.2 million of age 65 and older.
From where do you get the "fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks"?
>I don't follow this comment at all, sorry.
I worry that someone here who can't follow a simple a population delta mapping from one generation to another isn't exactly arguing in good faith.
>Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security.
No, we are talking about the previous net contributors (vs receivers) -- that is Boomers vs Greatest Gen in the 1980s -- versus the current net contributors (vs receivers), e.g. Millennials vs Boomers now.
That number has gone down dramatically, and because of that, social security is effectively insolvent.
>Under the current structure, the Social Security Administration estimates that Social Security will pay full benefits until 2033, when it will be forced to reduce benefits by about 23%.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2026/05/12/the-comin...
The reason why it's insolvent now is that the relative number of payment contributors to payment receivers has gone down dramatically. Today there are "fewer young people per old person" than there were in previous generations.
And because poor people don’t have much money, the government decided it could borrow heavily from future generations and give it to rich ppl, making them even poorer.
The reality is that these data centers make money for billionaire douchebags.
And unlike the billionaire douchebags of yesteryear they don't invest in the local economy. NOTHING IS TRICKLING DOWN In fact our modern billionaire douchebags love talking about how much they hate humanity.
nothing ever trickled down. philanthropy is not trickle down, and the gates foundation has to be one of the most critical I know of.
Carnegie at least built libraries
Well, MacKenzie Scott seems to be doing her best but she's the exception.
The idea that capitalism off loads the cost of externalities onto the unwitting public is nothing new. This is just the most recent and obvious version. Air anbd water pollution are the old ones. They make the pollution and the public pays for it with superfund sites or increased health care costs.
The solution is having the consumer pay for the externalities when they use the product. But this would make AI so much more expensive. When you use AI you are exploiting other people. Just keep that in mind.
The last two sentences are drawing downvotes to an otherwise sensible comment.
I agree. But is it a false statement?
It's the tired pattern of absolving the direct bad actors (the corpos themselves), as well as corrupt regulators who give them a pass, in favor of diffusing the responsibility onto individuals. If we're talking about collective action to solve the problem, it should be more of the form of demanding regulation that directly stops the bad actors, rather than this nonsensical fallacy from the same vein as "voting with our wallets".
I think it's people that do that, not capitalism. This happens in every system that has existed in human history.
Absolutely not. The default economic system is anarchy, also known as sharing and mutual aid. You see this even in the reddest of US states, where disaster victims help each other, and a huge pastime is sharing food via potlucks. But all evidence points to anarchical/egalitarian cultures as the baseline mechanism of human organization from prehistory.
Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems, because there is no hierarchical separation between producer and consumer. You can't push off costs to some members of the community when they have equal power to retaliate in kind, and there is no incentive to do so.
> Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems
Sure they do. I do a thing, it benefits me but causes a problem for my neighbor in the process, I say "oh well fuck him", that's a textbook externality.
> they have equal power to retaliate in kind
A convenient fiction often engaged in by proponents of anarchy. In practice if you compare pairs of people at random you will find almost none that can reasonably be described as equal. Equality is something imposed by the law in an attempt to improve our lives on average.
Anarchy lasts exactly as long as it takes people to start banding together and no longer.
Ok so you’d win a community upstream on a river and you build a dam and hive off the water
Downstream 500 miles away another community loses their water source
Those externalities still exist
Haiti is in Anarchy. All sharing and mutual aid is shadowed by resource and power struggle. It is even worse than communism and fascism.
> Haiti is in Anarchy
This is what people say when they have no idea what people mean by the POLITICAL system of Anarchism (Libertarian Socialism).
Anarchism, the political system, is not "chaos". That is propaganda that started during the 1930's. If you want to learn about it, real the Anarchist FAQ.
(I have a degrees in American History and Economics if that matters).
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-ed...
Yeah, and communism has never been given a fair shake, either. For that matter, neither has laissez-faire capitalism.
At some point, you need to accept that your favorite "-ism" has an impedance mismatch with human nature.
Anarchism means "without hierarchy". This how humans organized until the populations of sedentary agricultural communities exploded. I will argue, and keep arguing despite downvotes, that anarchism has the least impedance mismatch with human nature out of every system, because it was the status quo before civilization became the norm.
pretty sure humans had hierarchy from the beginning.
Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems
Neither do computers.
How will this be fixed when the public doesn’t have any power to make changes, and politicians are bribed—i.e., lobbied—by all these companies building data centers?
Related coverage without invoking the AI bogeyman:
"Liberty Utilities needs to replace 75% of Tahoe power supply as NV Energy deal ends soon"
https://mynews4.com/news/local/liberty-utilities-needs-to-re...
from the article: "NV Energy plans to end its contract with Liberty in May 2027, citing growing demand and its own resource constraints."
the "growing demand" is the AI datacenters (the linked story goes into detail). it's the direct result, so while it might feel soothing that this other story doesnt actually mention "AI" it's mostly just an omission.
(edit) the issue is that there's a sudden tight timeline and yes as other comments mention it's too bad the issue wasn't addressed sooner, but that's not very unusual when there's no major impetus to force a change. and that whether or not AI/LLM is a net good for society (I literally have Claude writing code for me as I type this), the energy issue is one that seems to be a real one (unlike the water issue which mostly seems to be not so real).
the town^H^H^H^H region (edit) is already in the process of expanding their infrastructure to get power from elsewhere so things will be "fine", but this is a terrible time to have a government that is rabidly cancelling non-fossil energy projects as fast as possible.
Tahoe is not a town. It is a region containing many towns. Most of it will continue to have power (mostly through NV Energy). This is a single utility that has failed to plan for this planned transition for 17 years. Invoking the data center bogeyman for political sympathy is the only thing going on here. Liberty has failed repeatedly to address this problem for nearly two decades and it's beyond time they were cut loose. I have sympathy for the people who have to suffer from their failure but this is not NV Energy's fault nor is it related to data centers at all: NV energy has been rapidly expanding capacity faster than growth in consumption and has 19 active geothermal plants in the area with more on the way as well as wind and solar.
I have no problem with new datacenters being built, but if the Fortune article is to be believed, it's that the suddenly tight timeline is due to the rapid increase in need for these facilities.
my post is more about how we really need to be seeking energy sources from all possible corners, and we have a government that is literally paying billions to contractors to cancel wind projects.
> without invoking the AI bogeyman
If AI is the cause of these data centers, why is it not the bogey man? This sounds like you personally want to use AI with out acknowledging the externalities and the burden your use of AI puts on your fellow citizens.
This is an interesting problem. I have been wanting to dig deeper on some of the complaints around water and power. This one is unique though.
Doesn’t read much like a problem so much with data center growth as it does with Liberty mismanaging their business/assets. For almost 20 years liberty acted as nothing more than a transmission operator with very weak agreements on power generation. They should have been figuring out this problem long ago.
I would think that a lot of rural electrical cooperatives are "nothing more than a transmission operator" i.e. they own/manage/maintain the lines from their providers out to their customers, but don't have the capital or expertise to run generating plants.
“nothing more than a transmission operator with very weak agreements on power generation” don’t take the quote out of context now.
I would bet most coops have fairly concrete contracts on generation. This one is unique because they were using usage from a grid they have no standing in. Weak agreement, folks should have been figuring it out 20 years ago.
Humans are bad at solving problems before they need to be solved.
Not having a reliable power source sounds like a here and now problem.
It was working until it wasn't.
If the residents of Tahoe owned their electricity provider, we wouldn't be having this problem. This was the norm up utnil the late 20th century and then we started selling off all the utilities for "efficiency". These public-private "partnerships" (or just straight privatization with a regulated industry) allow investors to keep profits while pushing losses onto the public.
Private equity is getting into utilities because it's a captive market, the service is highly inelastic and the owners are generally allowed to push all capex onto customer bills without recourse.
So your "interesting problem" is simply not seeing this as what it is: profit extraction.
The Tahoe area has very strong NIMBYism regulations making it effectively impossible to build power plants in the area.
It's not just a Liberty Utilities problem. Other nearby utilities, like TDPUD are in the same boat, only buying electricity and not generating it, and they are publicly owned.
Don’t start throwing private equity as another scape goat. This is more of a regulatory gap than anything. They pay CPUC rates but NV is effectively their grid. This is definitely in the wheelhouse of Liberty and Lake Tahoe residents should have been figuring out the issue.
This is like the movie Chinatown, where people were fighting over water, but now it's all about electricity.
It sounds like Lake Tahoe residents kicked the can down the road and didn't care about electricity for so long that now they have to pay the piper. I think it's entire just that they have to bear the costs of their own electricity.
What exactly am I supposed to do as a resident to change how a state government regulated utility operates? Please respond with something other than "Vote", which I already do.
Sometimes it's mostly about taking an interest, reading or understand the legislation, and making a really good case and argument to the government.
I don't think I can claim credit because I'm sure I wasn't the only one, but it took 3 or 4 emails to a couple of legislator offices to get some policy changes. In my case it might've just been small enough (no news coverage, basically only a small number of people were aware of a regulatory memo), the first time or two they just kicked the can down the road deferring the implementation, until ultimately they reversed course. And my part was just laying out a very strong case for why the particular situation was unfair, how many people would be impacted (voters), etc. Nothing confrontational, just laying out the argument.
If they are a Rural Electric Membership Corporation (REMC) you could vote for the board members, or run for office yourself.
Blogs, newsletters, websites are nearly zero dollars per month cost. Expose their corruption via 1st amendment rights and get others to vote them out with you.
1) Boycott the products and share the idea with others. 2) Show up to town meetings BEFORE these data centers come. 3) Organize! This is the most important. Yes, voting does not matter, but being a loud constituency does.
Boycott what products? I can't boycott my electricity. There is only one provider.
Re #2) I am a tahoe resident and these data centers aren't in my towns. They are far away. I'm not blaming the data centers for these problems, I just disagree with OP that "Tahoe residents kicked the can down the road". Many of us just go to work, take care of our families, and pay our electric bill. Just not sure how this is our fault.
Chinatown was based on a real event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars
DCs are as thristy as they are hungry. Once the lake gets low enough, they'll fight over the water supply too.
That’s how I read it too. Liberty alongside constituents had 20 years to figure it out.
Data centers are just the new shock titles that people eat up.
I've noticed there's a pattern of behavior with folks living in the forested parts of California where they expect everyone else to subsidize their impractical choice on where to put a house.
Extreme wildfire risks? let everyone else shoulder the cost, don't deny our fire insurance.
Power delivery infra costs (and associated risks, see wildfires)? don't make us actually pay for this, we're all in this together guys!
This is a good point when it comes to issues with "taming" the free market.
Eh, not really.
Few years ago everybody was talking about the inadequacies of our aging electricity distribution infrastructure and how it was a shame it wasn't being fixed and the risks it entails.
Now folks are wailing about the terrible AI come for our electricity and how awful the burden of the upgrades are.
When the upgrades were for solar they were good, when upgrades are for AI they're bad. It's almost like people just want to complain about anything associated with something they don't like regardless of relevance.
Why should locals be happy that someone is building AI data centers?
I can understand it for the country as a whole. AI is a last desperate gamble for the US to stay relevant and fight of China. But then maybe the federal government should start paying for it.
> When the upgrades were for solar they were good, when upgrades are for AI they're bad.
Do you look at every issue in this 50,000 foot view with no nuance or even basic details, or is just certain ones?
Is it not clear that I'm criticizing the people who have that attitude?
It's almost like people just want to complain about anything associated with something they don't like regardless of relevance.
I've noticed that we don't hear a lot about the EV boogyman taking down our electric grid now that AI has come to town.
I mean EVs are a change in power source, with an increase in energy efficiency even. AI is a brand new massive energy draw that isn't really reducing much elsewhere, and with a huge question mark over how much value it brings to the vast majority of the population.
I'd say the people complaining about AI likely see EVs as having some utility. While AI may have some utility, the amount of resources invested seems to make it more of a ponzi scheme waiting to pop.
EVs can also (at least in some cases) be charged from on-prem solar panels and not burden the public grid at all.
It's weird to read an article about how AI is ruining Lake Tahoe, with a map illustrating the problem, when the map itself has the world's most generic "100% generated by Claude" UI ever.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the article using the Claude map. It's just deeply funny somehow.
I'd love for us to get away from this trope of ever-increasing umbrella categories that you are discouraged from criticizing if you participate in it, very commonly marked by usage of the term "funny"/"hilarious" to imply hypocrisy.
The world is big and complicated. "AI" is the biggest umbrella category we have ever seen in modern civilization. There's nothing inherently wrong with criticizing AI while using AI. There's nothing inherently wrong with criticizing a country while living in that country. There's nothing inherently wrong with criticizing a company while using that company's service. Etc.
"Hypocrisy!" is a favorite accusation of those with the same-but-opposite bias as the one they are calling out. It's the easiest attack to construct, because you can point to anything and omit the complication of reality.
And people are hypocritical! That's part of why it's such an easy thing to claim. But it's also the reason you need a stronger argument than just stating the claim. You need to separate yourself from the endless sea of low-quality internet snipes that rely on simple accusations of hypocrisy.
Disagree strongly - reasonable people can hold different beliefs, and being able to accept that is an important part of being able to discuss issues reasonably, but if someone's actions show the opposite of how they say the world should be for others...
That's especially the case for incredibly optional things like choosing to generate an AI image or buying from a company that the buyer says is immoral. (I don't include moving from a country in the incredibly optional category.)
I think hypocrisy is perhaps one of the most useful criticisms we have to evaluate others in terms of whether they sincerely hold the beliefs they espouse -- for example, if a politician or entertainer says "Everyone should not do x", maybe that's a sincerely-held belief that we should respect. But if we then find out that politician or entertainer was actually doing x, maybe it's not actually a sincerely-held belief we should respect their views about.
For US readers, like if <Dem or GOP party> said "Politician X is bad for Y reason" but we then find out the accusing party was actually doing Y, is there any stronger indicator about whether their espoused beliefs were at least sincerely-held, regardless of whether we disagreed with the view?
> And people are hypocritical!
"And people are <___>" could be said about most other illegal or frequently-criticized behaviors -- and would especially be the case if the consequences for the other behaviors were only as bad as the "consequences" faced for hypocrisy. But that doesn't mean we should avoid criticizing those other behaviors for that reason.
Agree and it has applied to pretty much everything for a long time.
It's why when I bitch about the UK, I get told if I don't like it why don't I leave.
It's like my dudes fail to grasp to concept of loving something and wanting it to be even better, to solve minor quibbles with it.
Sometimes I think the world would be a much better place if people consciously realized the human psyche made the "Availability" choice in terms of CAP theorem.
Bravo, everybody should read this.
My read is
People complain about AI in public, use it heavily in private, complain about datacenters in public, slam their fists about usage limits in private.
In short, typical human behavior, want to have their cake and eat it too.
It’s like using social media to spread your message about how social media is bad and addictive.
You don’t really have another option unless you want to ostracize yourself from the society you’re trying to change.
Are most people really using it a lot in private? As someone not working in programming, neither I nor 95% of my friends and family purposefully use AI for anything. And the few that do use it mostly use it as a wikipedia replacement.
Like if I needed some throw away generic art I might use it, so maybe a few times a year. And some searches will give me ai results to read before I can scroll to click wikipedia. But if that cost me anything, required a free login, or even had to scroll past a wiki or research link, I would just keep going to wikipedia.
Specific jobs benefit a lot from AI, but the general population? I still find it questionable if people will benefit or even want to use ai commonly.
I'd rather the AI providers bear the cost of the externalities they inflict on the world.
If the cost to users is reasonable with that added burden I'll happily pay it. If it is not viable without passing costs on society, then they should not be in business.
This is such a bizarre image to conjure. It's so extremely self-satisfying for your position - why even go this far?
"Heavily"? "Complain"? "Slam their fists"? "Want to have their cake and eat it too?"
All in the service of describing how you assume your enemies are. This is beyond the pale for HN. Really petty.
On mobile the map prevents the user from scrolling down, you need to drag the padding area instead. Google maps embed doesn't have this issue as it requires two fingers to pan.
"Breaking: Smartphone producers known to rely on slave labor keep doing it. Posted from my iPhone"
That isnt the slam you think it is.
https://truthout.org/art/mister-gotcha/
Isn't this just a false dichotomy in web comic form? Implying that there are only two options, full participant or complete withdrawal from society, as a means of suggesting that one cannot apply morals to how one chooses to engage with society.
But in reality, there are many many ways to engage in society, some more or less ethical/moral than others, and one is free to criticize individual choices.
Even if we consider something like social media, there is still a range of choices other than fully engaging in social media and rejecting all social media. There are attempts to use it responsible, limiting and curating use to less harmful versions while attempt to get most of the benefit, while still postulating that the overall effect of the average use case of social media is harming society.
It feels a lot like saying that, since it is impossible to live a perfectly ethical/moral life, ethics and morals can be completely ignored without regard for what options one does have available to them.
The comic is pointing out how absurd that false dichotomy is.
GP comment was basically verbatim from first 2 panel, with slaves replaced with decent wages.
Point being, you can complain about thing, even if you are forced to interact with said thing.
That's subjective my friend. The fact that you draw an opinion doesn't make it more valid. I think there's merit to confronting people on high horses to their own lies.
Hypocrites just can’t let go of this comic. They love it. It’s like they have one thing that they hold onto for dear life. I don’t think they’ll ever stop posting it lol
It's truly ironic the way this comic is now primarily used as part of the same behavior it's criticizing.
Im sure you are very intelligent.
It will be hilarious if Google built a data center in Nevada only to run Incline Village out of power (where Sergey Brin pretends to live as a tax dodge).
> where Sergey Brin pretends to live as a tax dodge
It's not just Brin who lives there. The median wealth of that town is at least 10x everywhere around it. It's the closest city in Nevada to the Bay Area. Back before California changed the law, if you had stock options you earned in CA and then moved to NV before you sold them, you could avoid paying income tax. Or if you sold your company.
I know multiple people who moved to Incline right before vesting or selling. They would come back to the Bay Area each weekend to see their wife and kids and work remotely during the week. As long as they spent more than 1/2 their time in NV they didn't have to pay CA tax.
CA has since closed that loophole -- if you earn it in CA they will come for the tax even if you live in another state when you sell it. But for the last 20+ years, it was a tax strategy that a lot of people used.
It's not just personal wealth either, Apple uses a shell company in Reno, NV to tax dodge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braeburn_Capital
I didn’t realize the scale of data centers in northern Nevada. Residential customers will mostly pay 70% for the transmission line costs. 12 data centers by 2033 with 5,900 MW of power.
“NV Energy is building Greenlink West, a 525-kV, $4.2 billion transmission line from Las Vegas to Yerington, expected online in May 2027. Schwarzrock said Liberty would be “first in the waiting line” when Greenlink opens, giving it access to a wider pool of energy providers. But that timeline matches the contract deadline exactly, leaving almost no margin for error. About 70% of the project’s costs will be borne by Southern Nevada customers. But this is nothing new, at least according to NV Energy.”
At lot of west coast datacenters have moved to Nevada in search of lower land prices and better seismic risk. Vegas is a major hub now too.
I didn’t realize the scale of data centers in northern Nevada.
I also find it hard to wrap my head around the scale involved. Right now I'm putting together a home server with 4x GPUs. Never having worked with a real server chassis before, I didn't really think the logistics through. It weighs over 100 pounds and requires two people to move. It had to be delivered on a pallet and unloaded with a forklift, way too big for UPS. Takes up my whole desk at the moment. Needs a 220V 30A outlet. If I stuffed it full of RTX6000s, it would draw about 6 kW.
And this article talks about a 6 GW project, so that's... a million of these giant power-slurping boat anchors.
There's a similar data center project in Utah which is also causing a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. That one is 9 GW. 1.5 million huge-ass (to me) 4U servers. This just seems nuts.
A lot of these types of AI complaints feel like blaming a pothole for cracking your windshield in half even though you've been driving around with it full of chips and micro cracks for years. It's certainly exacerbated the issue to a point where it's impossible to ignore now but the warning signs have been there for years- utilities and municipalities failing to secure power and water resources for future residents, companies engaging in mass layoffs only for the stock prices to climb. AI adoption aggravated the symptoms, the root causes remain the same.
I think it's more that our governments only leap to patch up some of those chips and cracks when big biz rolls thru, even though "the little guy" has been raising it as an issue for decades.
But then again, democracy absolutely fails in that you have to already be rich to be a politician most of the time and people tend to vote extremely tribally by party rather than on policies (lest they accidentally vote for the wrong party!)
The truth is in many democracies none of the parties are prepared to do what needs to be done most of the time, nor is the average voter prepared to accept any form of compromise or abstain from uninformed, knee-jerk and tribally motivated reactions to proposed policy.
Aka we only have our dumb selves to blame.
The difference is whether the government or the people are complaining then, right?
Or do you have something else in mind?
To me it's a classic "commons" problem. All our wealth in the end comes from extracting common resources and "making the best" of it.
Whether "the best" is to sustain population levels or to maximize private capital is a political question.
As of now, demanding things like free access to clean water is considered ideological and misguided by many people, maybe even "extreme".
I don't think it's that clear of a delineation especially in situations like this with utilities and governments wrestling over regulations. I believe that a lot of the folks who have been in the drivers seat and ignored the chips in the windshield that is the fabric of our society are happy to have something to direct blame towards no matter their affiliations or underlying beliefs about how resources ought to be managed, or even their own attitudes about AI usage.
i understand your point, however your "driver's seat" metaphor blurs the accountability of political representation IMO. Are voters in the "driver's seat"? Local governments?
What I see as a valuable point is that federal governments with subsidies that "distort" markets for public goods and externality regulation, worsen the "tragedy of the commons".
Explaining many things to a naive person, or a kid, boils down to this type of issue, you can even extend it to nation states.
Without experience of violence, most people would intuitively understand that a "competition" between governments is problematic.
Same issue, different undertones: tax havens.
I really disagree with the idea that goverment subsidies are either inherently good or bad overall.
Agricultural subsidies are often poorly distributed and managed from corruption and greed, but agricultural subsidies is also the only alternative to the granary system to prevent famine, and the granary system regularly failed and still resulted in famines. Countries with any decent agricultural subsidies however have essencially eliminated famine, despite the low 1-2% profit margins but 30% variations in yearly yield that farms have to weather.
It's because the accountability isn't clear cut. Many hands have touched those levers of power over the last 20 years this specific problem has incubated, not all of them governmental.
I see, maybe I am underestimating local factors and individual responsibility here. After all, democracy depends on people to vote, and wealthy people generally are free to move and can more easily buy property, even if unsafe. So the individual financial or survival risk of relying on "society" (for example, insurance, firefighting, infrastructure etc) also anti-proportional to wealth/ a beach house is not the same as a rented flat or hard-earned small apartment in some precarious space.
Still sounds like an instance of redistribution problems to me.
> utilities and municipalities failing to secure power
To be fair, it's not as if they didn't often try to build more power.
As it turns out, most people don't like having a massive fuel-burning power plant near their homes. Now they don't even like having solar panel fields near their homes. These people often are the same kind to show up at city hall or public utility board meetings and raise a fuss.
Now, are they doing it and returning to houses that take a crapload (I do believe that is the technical term) of energy to heat and cool because of out-of-date windows, insulation, and HVAC controls? Maybe. Are they sometimes also the same people who hated the idea of phasing out incandescent bulbs? Probably. But either way, that power source ain't getting built.
> and water resources
Kansas City, St. Louis, Omaha, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Columbus all sit on major rivers or massive freshwater lakes and aren't in a desert climate. We could do something with that.
as an Arizonan with a rapidly rising water bill because of Colorado River standoffs that one is personal :)
The NIMBY problem is very real especially for an area filled with resorts and vacation homes, but when you have 20 years to figure it out I think there has to be more than that at play. They're ultimately going to fix the problem with a transmission line anyways.
Good. I don't think any electricity should be used for homes. It's wastes resources on people who will soon be economically unviable, and really constrains the data center build-out.
You win the sarcasm award.
It’s not clear that these high wildfire risk places should be populated. They’re like the flood plains of Texas. I don’t think any utility under CPUC pricing can reasonably supply them for a long time. The price comes out of something: defensible space clearing, lack of power generation contracts, or all this pushed to another vendor.
The vagaries of American politics allow for failure and then bailout as a mechanism for these sorts of situations but I think we can see the writing on the wall. 50k residents at an average million dollars a resident is $50 b so it is not quite possible to have a buyout so I see why we just allow for the decline.
But any more we allow for the place to be inhabited, the greater the risk. Otherwise it’s just an incredibly regressive use of our resources: taxing a lot of working age people in the more urbanized areas to fund wealthy retirees in the forest.
The current tide of California politics favors that and we can do it so long as our economic productivity is powered by tech but a time will come after and it’s better now to do this than after when we will find ourselves unable to sustain productive capacity.
just as a thought experiment, say you're an entrepreneur, how would you solve this problem?
whether it AI, Data Centers, EVs...I'm seeing this problem more and more, we need more energy/power. I'm curious to see what others think are possible viable solutions.
This isn't a problem that can be solved by a clever entrepreneur. This is what government is for. When you have a shared resource that everyone needs, government is the best option for making sure its distribution is fair.
We already know how to solve this: make transmission owned by the government, make generation free-market. Cities do this already. The city of Santa Clara owns all the transmission, and then buys power on the open market along with generating themselves.
The result is their power costs 1/2 as much as all the surrounding cities that have PG&E.
I was actually going to disagree on first glance but I absolutely agree with this.
Transmission has no business edge, you will gain the best economies of scale by having the city (or larger regional) manage it.
Free-market works on the generation side because as prices change, producers can decide to build out more capacity or innovate to gain an edge. I don’t think a single monopoly construct, like the PG&Es of the world, have incentive to innovate and properly serve the market.
And ironically (not really), this setup is more market competitive. Instead of having transmission owned by 1 maybe 2 companies who also monopolize generation, you get a government who just buys the power as cheap as people can make it. There are better incentives on the government owned transmission than on a company owned transmission.
Nuclear has a ton of VC interest right now. Or the robinhood dude with his space beaming stuff.
I think anything you can do to add to the energy mix is worthwhile atm. Does America produce any domestic solar panels? I’m talking wafers not assembly.
I still think decoupling generation from transmission is part of the problem and I don’t know if I love the construct of a single legislated monopoly.
In this specific case, Liberty and constituents should have come up with a plan on the first contract term for generation. Maybe it meant spinning up their own generation plant within CA or NV.
It’s not a popular idea here but I still think energy markets can help solve this problem. If you have multiple producers and a market rate for electricity you can more quickly incentivize new generation and innovation compared to the single operator monopolies that exist.
I'd come up with a variety of ways to interfere with the placement of datacenters, and I'd sell them as a service to people who don't want a datacenter to interfere with their access to water or electricity. This would be, hopfully, absurd enough to make the government realize that they need to step in and make my business model irrelevant.
If you're xAI, just build your own power plants:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus...
become a politician and make electricity a public resource, as it should be
Entrepreneurs know exactly how to solve this issue: panels, batteries, and wires. But it isn't so simple when you face 20 years of permitting between BLM, USFS, tribes, states, counties, cities, and individual litigation. If you want an example of how bad this is look at the permitting timeline for SunZia in New Mexico and its transmission line to California.
Gas pipelines don't have the same problem because the federal government exercises centralized permitting and eminent domain powers for fossil fuels under a 1938 law, and there is no corresponding statute for electric lines.
Has there been any attempt for some sort of legislation that would allow utility solar or electric lines to be included in that?
Power should be a public utility, just like water and sewage.
You can make a reasonable case for transmission and distribution to be a government operated public utility. But we need aggressive private industry competition on the generation and storage side in order to prevent shortages.
Why ? Many country have public generation without any shortages.
And do those countries have large and rapidly growing demand? A free market is the only reliable way to respond effectively to changing demand signals. Economic central planning always fails over the long term.
> And do those countries have large and rapidly growing demand? A free market is the only reliable way to respond effectively to changing demand signals. Economic central planning always fails over the long term.
It's not the only reliable way.
Also the free market has a bad habit of settling on "most profitable" (in the short-medium term) configurations by sacrificing resiliency.
Pacific Gas and Electric was built by engineers, who had a mandate to transfer huge amounts of power across very large and difficult terrain. When the management in the 1950s post-WWII society had this mandate, they executed amazing feats of engineering with very reliable outcomes. Much later, the very stable and profitable grid attracted a new kind of management, those interested in money. New kind of cost-cutting around maintenance, new kinds of labor relations involving non-union subcontractors, and a lot of advanced financial engineering involving using money to make money, took over from the previous internal culture. This was executed carefully and with a lot of control, and was successful, until the de-regulation of the electricity markets and then Enron.
Within a very short time frame, the previously iron-clad engineering of 1950s PG&E was defeated and failed, under new economic regulation. Read a couple of books about it, there are many.
What was discovered in the emergency proceedings that occurred in California during the California power grid crisis orchestrated by Enron and others, was that the upper management of PG&E had found legal loopholes in their very strict oversight, and were using dubiously declared shell companies to purchase power generating assets across the entire USA. Once those assets were purchased, and out of sight of regulators, more financial engineering took place. But the entire situation was discovered during the blackout hearings.
source: an attorney who worked for Sacramento directly involved in those hearings.
A "free market" is an attractive statement to some, politically, but we are very far down the road already for some of those experiments.
> Economic central planning always fails over the long term.
So do businesses - capitalism has business failure built in and expected. Private industry in energy has failed the public dramatically at times. Economic planning works in many respects - lots of places do fine with roads, energy, healthcare, water, gas, other transport infra (airports, subways, etc.).
The question is, which tool does what well, and how do we apply them? Private industry is good for rapid innovation and development, and for keeping things off the public ledger - smartphones, etc. It isn't good when failure isn't an option, such as police, water, ... look at hospitals, for a current example.
> central planning
These are bogey scare words - what is central about it? It's not a 5 year plan for the entire economy of the entire country.
In the US, power is a public utility. And regulated as such. The providers can be private though and depends a lot on the location.
Personally, I wouldn’t trust my city or county to operate a power plant and transmission lines. I’m happy that power is regulated by my state as a natural monopoly.
That is not 100% true though. In Burbank, CA the power is city owned.
https://www.burbankwaterandpower.com/
In the bay area, Santa Clara has city owned power, and residents pay something like a third of what the rest of the bay area does per kilowatt hour.
Part of the inspiration for why SF is trying to kick out PGE and have municipal power.
SVP delivers over 90% of their energy to commercial customers, making it a bit of a special case. However it does prove the hypothesis that large-scale consumers tend to lower, not raise, the local retail price for energy.
As for SF, there is no real sense in which they are trying to kick out PG&E. While there is and always has been a vocal group of SF residents who want a free pony, when it comes down to paying the bills SF has voted in 12 separate elections to not establish a municipal utility. They have a demonstrated history of failure to invest in their own utilities stretching back 100 years.
I didn’t say it was 100% true and there are exceptions.
I don’t know the true distribution, but I’d wager the vast majority of the US is served by either a corporation or some non-government organization.
Now I know and it’s 1/7 or about 15% of Americans have government or community owned power. [0]
[0] https://www.publicpower.org/public-power
Asses kill
That there are city owned utilities doesn't seem to refute any of prepend's statement.
> In the US, power is a public utility.
A city owned utility is both a public utiliy because it offers a utility service to the public and a public utility because it is municipally owned.
> And regulated as such.
I expect Burbank W&P is regulated by the CPUC, same as other power utilities that operate in California.
> The providers can be private though and depends a lot on the location.
Many providers are private; this one isn't, and it depends on the location.
> Personally, I wouldn’t trust my city or county to operate a power plant and transmission lines. I’m happy that power is regulated by my state as a natural monopoly.
This is, like prepend's opinion, man. I assume they are truthfully expressing their trust and happiness. Even if they lived within the service area of Burbank W&P or another municipal power utility, they might not trust it.
As to power being a natural monopoly, it's hard to tell exactly given that it exists in a highly regulated market; but I don't know of any US markets where there is a choice for electrical distribution. You get the utility that serves your property, or you get to pay them to build their network to serve your property, or you get no utility power (and in some locations, no certiticate of occupancy). I'm sure there's some exceptions such as a lot that stradles the service areas or a lot with a high availability use that requirea feeds from multiple substations and it makes more sense to wire to a substation from a neighboring utility. And there's the legacy DC power networks in some old cities. But generally, there's no overbuilding of competing distribution lines; unlike say telecom where many areas have at least two of copper telephone, copper coax cable, and fiber telecom; and often several vendors if you're willing to pay commercial rates for cabling.
Porn
Kill at all
Palo Alto's power is city owned as well. I think we're building out fiber too.
Public infrastructure shouldn't be private. Imagine the nightmare of privately owned roads and highways.
A somewhat more prominent example of this model would be Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Does prominence really matter when providing supporting evidence to contradictory statement?
Concord, MA, has a municipal power company and a municipal isp. I think they run a power plant, but I know they maintain the transmission lines.
this is a false statement. There are many kinds of business structures around power generating companies, across the USA.
Private companies can operate more efficiently offering better service and competitive pricing. How do you not know that privatization is the solution? /s
Northern Nevada would be such an obvious place to build out large amounts of solar energy as well
There are quite a few already (though not as many as in the southern part): https://cleanview.co/solar-farms/nevada
Prosperity is closely correlated with energy availability. Can we please build some power plants?
Sure, ETA for a nuclear power plant is ~15-20 years from now, wind is ~5-10, solar is 2-6, natural gas is 2-4 years. Data centers take 18 - 24 months. Even if build out for power infrastructure needed had started when the demand became apparent (which, it’s not clear that it has done). You should still expect electricity costs to inflate due to the ~100GW of additional demand that has been announced, because there is no way to build the power infrastructure in less time than it takes to build the additional data centers. It’s also not clear that there would be enough elasticity in the supply chain for building any of these generation methods that you even could strike ground on increasing us electricity production by the ~10% needed over the given time frame. The reality is, there is no way to build all the additional data centers without significant inflationary pressure, that will be borne by everyone except the well connected hyperscalers with excellent lobbyists unless average people actually realize that fact and force their dealing with the relevant municipalities and grid operators to be transparent.
Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Energy_Server only takes a few months to install and only requires natural gas pipelines.
Fine! So let's get started then! I don't care about data centers. I don't care about AI. Maybe it's here to stay, maybe it's a passing trend. I care about humans, and human prosperity.
Human prosperity - ours and our grandchildren's - is to a large degree determined by how much power we produce. So let's get started producing more.
The best time to have built a power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
Same content: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nearly-50-000-lake-tahoe-1709...
TL;DR Libertarian separatists, who went so far as to name their utility "Liberty Utilities", organized their utility in 2009 under a temporary agreement with Nevada, which was extended twice, and now after almost two decades of failing to invest in their own generating assets they will be deprioritized by their ex-partner.
I see that a sibling comment beat me to it, but "Libertarian separatists"? They're well-organized separatists given they're spread across, what, a couple dozen states? It's quite the narrative you've spun, and it would be almost as interesting if it were true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquin_Power_%26_Utilities
Your backstory is complete nonsense.
Liberty Utilities has nothing to do with libertarian separatists. It's a brand name of Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp, a boring Canadian infrastructure conglomerate that buys regulated water, gas, and electric systems across North America. They bought this chunk of rural California grid from NV Energy in 2009. That's it.
Biosacks will be pushed to the margins as more GDP share is created by tokens and corporations are able to lobby for votes.