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Energy neutrality? Every utility has differential industrial and residential and commercial pricing, and energy discounts are super common for localities to lure development. China is the extreme end, where some places actually get free power, but even here there's all kinds of discounts our special rates. What do you think Amazon is trying to get cities to grovel for? Special tax discounts, energy rates, whatever they can get.

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As far as I know differential pricing is based on classes like industrial vs commercial and applied fairly. Incentives for development are super common of course, and controversial in themselves.

This would be different though, targeting a business to pay more than other commercial enterprises. That's a targeted disincentive, and if not structured generically and applied fairly it's bad policy. Seems hardly different than Comcast deliberately slowing Netflix down, not to extract revenue, but to put them out of business.

It's just the opposite of targeting a business to pay less than other enterprises, which happens all the times as development incentives. I don't think it's any worse policy than that, it's just the flipside.

In this case, due to the fact that by taking the town's total usage up, they raise the costs for everyone in the town, you could also just see as internalizing an externality.

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