The way utility rates are set allows them to spread costs onto residential ratepayers instead of bearing it directly.

It is like Obamacare. You have a person who smokes, gets drunk, eats a lot of sugar, don't exercise, you pay for their bill through hiked premiums, and overutilization. Hopefully, that sinks in.

even under the assumption that they do pay the exact same prices as normal citizens (they don't). electricity prices will go up the more usage there is, as they mostly rely on limited factors.

Bigger clients negotiate bulk discounts, basically. But the other factor at play here is supply and demand. The higher the demand, the higher the price for the supply. Household demand has remained more or less the same, but because data center demand has shot up, prices have too.

In the countries where healthcare has existed (and worked) for decades, there are additional taxes to alcohol, sugar, tobacco, petrol to cover for this.

And also yeah, and I have no problem whatsoever knowing that a small part of my salary goes towards saving the life of people who wouldn't be able to afford private healthcare. That's called empathy - and I wish that'd sink in as well.

isn't that the reverse argument? Typically only <20% of people take the healthcare system for granted whilst everyone else pays their dues. Here, it's everyone pays their electricity bills but 1 absolute behemoth of a customer hordes the resources, and instead of being cut off or denied service as would be typical in other services, they pay hand over fist to get first dibs on all resources, whilst passing off the cost to everyone else

Are data centers not paying their bills?

They are. The state has failed to ensure there is adequate supply to keep prices flat.

As prices go up it becomes more attractive to build more generating capacity. When capacity goes up prices will come back down.

Like health insurance isn’t already like that lol, lmao even.

Mind you, the Trump administration has made it much harder to install the cheapest electric generation available — solar and wind.

Spewing more inflammatory bullshit again, huh.

What? That doesn’t make any sense.

I’d rather my part of the public money go to help an alcoholic neighbor than to subsidize a certain Coastal Elite’s habit of buying golf courses and ballrooms.

It's essentially supply and demand. If the data center is willing to pay more, then everyone has to pay more. I hate it.

It makes sense if you're a greedy piece of shit that values corporate investment more than the people you serve.

I'm glad you see that it doesn't make sense though it means you are a good person.

Places like data centers don't pay the same rate that individuals do though. They get an industrial rate.

Basically they cut them a break so they can fuck you. The supply is more More than enough and the only demand that increased was from corporate interests.

"When capacity goes up prices will come back down"

Loooooool. I know that's how its supposed to work but you're mistaken if you think that they will ever decrease the price. That almost never ever happens.

My electric company (which is the only one in my area) even started fucking mining bitcoin and they hit us with a surge pricing model charging us even more for the electricity we use not only during daytime but also during summer. I'm sure they say some bullshit about capacity loads or whatever.

They sure got enough capacity to mine the fuck out of that bitcoin though.

Greedy fucks, all of them.

Yupp just like every single other aspect of our living here our lives have been made worse to protect the interests of large corporations.

Land of the free, and all that.

Ideally anyway. Government interference can always screw it up and create barriers to competition.

Where I live (Ontario, Canada) on-peak electricity prices have pretty much exactly kept pace with inflation over the past 20 years, so in effect electricity costs have not gone up.

Off-peak prices have crept up more than that but solar power doesn’t help with off-peak generation at all. Wind turbines do produce more at night but we’ve had government subsidies to encourage building wind power capacity and those subsidies result in higher wholesale prices for that power (actually above the off-peak prices consumers pay).