As electricity bills rise, candidates in both parties blame data centers

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5 points·JumpCrisscross··3 comments

What won't be blamed is rapacious capitalism and the abandonment of consumer protections in the utility space. People warned of this 30 years ago when the market model was adopted for utilities. Well, here we are.

Why are they charging customers near the datacenters more than others? Why don't they charge their customers the same rate?

I don't think we actually have a market economy for electricity in the US. Which electricity markets in the US have competition instead of government-granted anticompetitive monopolies (that are failing to solve for intraday storage)?

(The Carter administration was already starting to deregulate DOE which their administration created, for example.)

EU has more of market economy for electricity: you must have intraday electricity rates to be a member state of EU. (SIDC)

(Edit)

What percentage of US electricity markets have more than one supplier?

From "State-By-State Scorecard on Electricity Competition" (2025) https://www.rstreet.org/research/state-by-state-scorecard-on... :

> Active competition promotes efficiency and innovation, and this is as true in the electric power industry as it is elsewhere in society.

The incumbent government-created electricity monopoly here is allowed to prohibit customers from using their own solar electricity, with mandatory "Buy-All Sell-All" service agreements.

The sole electricity supplier in the region threatens to cancel service to customers for using the renewable electricity that they generate.

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