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  • Exoristos · 18 hours ago

    > Data centers use up an enormous amount of energy to power their facilities, whether for cloud storage or for AI. That enormous energy demand pushes up the cost of providing electricity to all customers and contributes to higher rates.

    If they mean costs rise proportionate to filling demand, that seems obvious. If they're claiming something more ominous, they haven't done a good job of arguing or even describing that in this article.

    > Oregon’s POWER Act ensures that these large energy users are paying their share, while ensuring residential and business customers aren’t footing their costs.

    "Paying their share" seems like almost a value statement. Since this isn't an editorial, it would be nice to have something more factually rich to read here.

    • altairprime · 3 hours ago

      https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2025R1/Measures/Testi...

      Start with the HB 3546 testimonies presented to their state legislature; one of the slide decks at the above example of such (I assume there are others) suggests that $200m+ of transmission upgrades on behalf of datacenters were charged evenly to all customers (I assume as a kWh rate component), rather than to those few incurring the excess demand; this is likely as a result of how their regulatory structure was set up in the past. Presumably that’s a core reason why the increase is so dramatic: +30% per kWh to pay for not only the immediate kilowatt hour transmission costs, but also the capital improvements necessary to deliver (as that slide deck puts it) the power demand of an entire city to a single customer. Perhaps long-term I would prefer they outright charge datacenters directly for the capex up front (just as Comcast or AT&T already charge residential customers to build out a new circuit in rural areas today!), but this is certainly a good first step towards de-externalizing costs that don’t benefit the statewide ratepayer base back onto the specific business segment incurring them.

      I imagine OPB has reporting on the HB that you might be able to dig up from their archives as well; if you do, please post it!