County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'
404media.co150 points by 01-_- 2 hours ago
150 points by 01-_- 2 hours ago
This is in Virgina, which passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act in 2020. This mandated that Dominion (the power company) transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045. Personally, I think this is a good thing in the long run, but in the short run, it means that Dominion has had to invest a lot in building out renewable projects that haven't come online yet.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently did an analysis on electricity prices in the US [1] and found that most of the rate increase in Virginia was attributable to the VCEA, and that load growth had a mitigating effect on price increases.
If you look at the overall report (not just Virginia), the places where electricty costs are rising the fastest are generally not the same places where lots of new datacenters are being built. It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are many factors at play here.
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/factors-influencing-recent-...
> It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are many factors at play here.
Henrico County currently has 37 data-centres with ~2 gigawatts capacity (expected to reach 3 gigawatts).
Apparently, 1 MW can power approximately 834 homes annually. So 2 gigawatts would be closer to powering > 1.6 million homes.
Surely, that kind of concentrated demand is going to affect electricity distribution costs for everyone, which is what we are seeing now.
Capacity shortfalls and needs to conserve (i.e., asking customers to reduce usage) are not necessarily 1:1 with rate increases and overall electricity costs. Especially in the short term.
In other words, large “base loads” like data centers could both reduce the average power bill AND contribute to capacity shortages and load shedding.
I work in industrial manufacturing and automation, several of my customers (those running steel foundries, aluminum die casting, plastic recycling and extrusion, and other power-intensive processes) represent a sizeable fraction of the utility usage in the small towns in which they're located.
They often have an individual contract with the utility and participate in load regulation: when you need liquefy a few tons of steel, those heaters have a lot of thermal inertia. If A/C loads are high they'll turn the power down, if wind output is high, they'll turn it up, and so on.
Do data centers participate in the same sort of dynamic pricing and power adjustment? I understand that they're spinning up and powering down instances on demand, and that those demands are somewhat outside of their control, but are they able (and willing, and desirous of reducing their electric bills) to dynamically adjust compute in response to utility rates?
So don't allow data centers to connect until enough clean energy has been brought online to meet their needs without impacting cost or availability for retail ratepayers. It's easy really. Say no.
It's so strange to me that the argument previously was "we don't have enough energy generation for EVs and heat pumps to electrify and decarbon" but data centers are thought of as must run load that everyone has to suffer in some way to enable (through increased rates or risk of blackouts), when they have very little positive impact for everyone except a small minority investing in them.
> It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are a lot of factors at play here.
It is because they are the problem. We need as much clean energy as quickly as possible to mitigate climate change, we do not need data centers, broadly speaking.
(if you replaced all of the farmland/ag land, the size of the state of Oregon, harvested for ethanol with solar, you would have more electrical generation than all current US electrical generation combined as of this comment; this is simply a question of will, proven by China's solar PV deployment rates [installing ~90-100GW of solar PV per month])
Their post said that load growth had a mitigating effect on prices. Not letting the data centers come online would, presumably, result in higher prices.
That seems slightly weird, but that sounds like there's some large fixed costs that they can spread over the entire subscriber base, so the extra data centers are picking up some of those fixed costs.
Agreed that in some situations, on some US electric grids (ISOs/TSOs), data centers are absorbing their electrical supply costs that would otherwise be externalities. This is good, I fully support this. This is not uniform unfortunately, and remains to be solved for in totality imho. I take no issue if we get to a point where the AI bubble pops and we're left with net new electrical infrastructure that continues to provide benefit decades into the future while the data centers sit silent (similar to the "fiber boom bust glut" at the turn of the century). I take issue with the AI bubble costs being pushed citizens already, broadly speaking, unable to make ends meet merely out of a desire to speculate (and no one can be sure how long this exuberance and hype cycle is going to last; as long as it lasts, humans who need electricity at a reasonable cost are at risk).
TLDR Humans need electricity to live, data center loads are a luxury that can wait for power to be provided, when available.
Do you have evidence that they are the problem. The research suggests otherwise. From some of the regional grids I have looked at the bigger problem has been lack of continued investment in transmission and generation. Even now I see so much push back for solar farms. People are their own worst enemy.
In the past couple decades, the vast majority of electricity demands have gone down due to modern substitutions for things people want being way more efficient. People use LED / CFL bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs, heat pumps instead of resistive heating for water heaters and house heaters, etc.
People have also deployed lots of solar to their houses.
So by every normal measure, just by looking around outside and evaluating how I live my life, even with an electric car, my power demands have gone way down.
So the fact that there's some gooner class stroking AI and crypto coins out their network ports and making my electricity more expensive, well, yeah, I'd say that nonsense is lots of externalities that should be better managed.
The Data-Center Boom Is Sparking a Third Wave of Inflation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48677039 - June 2026
Gartner Says Data Center Electricity Consumption to Grow 26% in 2026 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48665985 - June 2026
Nobody Here Wants the Data Center: An Oral History - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662607 - June 2026
Europe must choose between AI and climate goals, data center lobby says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48637512 - June 2026
Datacenter boom keeps dirty coal plants alive in the US - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465092 - June 2026
Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447122 - June 2026
A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Massive Data Center Instead - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439 - June 2026
Data Center Operators Are Trying to Fix Their Water Use Problems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401477 - June 2026
The US is now spending more on data center construction than on public transportation infrastructure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48366144 - June 2026
Ohio hits pause on datacenter tax breaks draining its coffers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48361555 - June 2026
Tracking at:
>The Data-Center Boom Is Sparking a Third Wave of Inflation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48677039 - June 2026
The article says
>Goldman Sachs economists forecast that data centers will account for nearly half of U.S. growth in power demand through 2030. As a result, they saw consumer electricity prices rising about 6% annually this year and next.
but it also cautions
>Even electricity accounts for only about 2.5% of consumer spending, according to the Labor Department.
Electricity has gotten more expensive, it's only growing twice as fast. It's also unclear how much of that it's due to AI, as goldman sacs claims. For instance, if you look at the BLS figures for electricity prices, it shows a huge in 2021-2022, well before the datacenter boom started. Others have mentioned rates are going up due to modernization efforts and/or the switch to renewables.
Thank you this. Super helpful. There were so many articles and most of them did not mention price I skipped through it aggressively.
I wish there was more science driven reports based on what’s really happening. So much of it seems to be spun into people’s emotions that’s it’s hard to make sense of it. The public energy companies like to blame data centers but then data in certain geographies suggest otherwise. There was a good semi analysis months ago on how pricing I believe in New England was less about data centers and more on how inefficient the forward auction was constructed for prices there.
I only skimmed because what I saw was either no evidence or low. They to touched on demand but not immediately the correlation to price which is hard to connect without supply and other mechanics that go into different electric grid geographies. This feels very similar to the water argument or the anti-solar farm crowd. Lots of emotions and not as many facts. I am going to lean on the original research link.
No worries, voters are engaged so I am not concerned. Data centers are a third rail in politics at the moment. I encourage politicians and lobbyists to voice their support so we know who they are, as elections have consequences.
‘Cost Me the Election’: Data Centers Trigger Voter Backlash - https://www.newsweek.com/cost-me-the-election-data-centers-t... - June 25th, 2026
Utah Senate President Loses Primary After Data Center Backlash - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/us/j-stuart-adams-utah-se... | https://archive.ph/MMot6 - June 24th, 2026
Where Republicans and Democrats stand on AI data centers - https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/where-republicans-and-democrats-... - June 12th, 2026
Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183512 - May 2026
Why would anyone be worried? I was asking for actual science behind your claims. If you cannot it’s ok, just cements my thinking similar to the water claims people like to make. It’s the modern hysteria.
My mental model of HN is there is a subset of forum participants who either don't believe the impact data centers are causing, or simply don't care. I’m not here to change hearts or minds (mental models are rigid, humans are emotion vs data driven); only to share data, and consume data.
I believe the data shows data centers to have an outsized impact on the costs discussed. Others may disagree, but the facts are the facts, especially if we're asking schools to conserve power while serving data center loads (per this post and related thread). That is not a fact in support of "data center power consumption is not of material concern, and does not require potential regulatory intervention." Quote the opposite (again, imho). If data centers do not have enough power, the solution is simple; force them to load shed and operate dynamically based on the remaining power available to them until more power is brought online.
Again, show one critical research paper that draws a solid link towards data centers and price increases. You linked to so many articles, many of which just spoke on demand increases. I absolutely believe that in some grids, data centers have driven some of the increase but you claiming that data centers are the only problem reads like those folks scared of solar farms being built.
Just because you want to believe it does not make it true. You are claiming it’s 100% the reason and I am suggesting it’s probably part of it but unclear if it’s 5% or 90%.