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.
And 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 a lot of factors at play here.
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.
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])
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.
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.
The greed with which the tech companies and data center providers are consuming electricity will be their downfall. By trying to make a few extra bucks by passing on some of the costs to consumers, it will trigger a huge political backlash that will screw them all. The fact they don't realize this is greed and hubris on their part.
Curiously, also taking place in Virginia, I just a local newspaper was bought out and fired their few journalists after they did an investigative piece on a google datacenters being built in the community.
ever been in a room of people sitting in cubicles where the lights are controlled by motion sensor to automatically turn off the lights after a set period of no motion? fun times. it took way longer to get that switch replaced than it should have
I was a contractor at Sun in '97, Palo Alto campus. Initially they put me in a shared office, and that was ok. Later, I got moved to a hallway.
My machine had a hard reboot that first night... I lost my unsaved work and at that point I made it a point of religiously saving my work each evening when I went home... because each night my machine rebooted.
One day it was rather quiet. Might have been day before a long weekend, but it was a slow day in the building - very few people were walking about. I was working... and then my machine lost power. I stood up to figure out what was going on and my machine got power back. Ok... followed power cords to the wall. It was plugged into a gray outlet (rather than white outlet). The gray outlets were hooked up to the motion sensor that was for the hall lighting.
Yes there are a bunch of terrible ideas in this thread. Video camera controlled lights? Yes f privacy of everyone to save a few bucks? well I think that was sarcastic
Motion controlled lights are always timed badly, incredibly annoying to have them switch off when you are sitting still working or taking a duece.
How about the janitor shuts off the lights after everyone goes home?
I think the issues are exacerbated by the US going from "regular growth in electricity generation" for decades to "dead flat" for the last ~2 decades. I think we're finding generation isn't just a switch you turn on and reap the benefits of overnight if it's not what you were already planning on doing https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/e...
Part of solving that may be in what the article touches on - how to get the generation built before the DC shows up rather than as a promise after.
You want to use a lot of electricity? Great! We sell electricity. We will need cash in advance to handle some upgrades, rather than passing those costs on to other rate payers.
Exactly! Everyone's been conditioned that Data Centers = higher electric bills for residents. Of course, another option is for politicians to put any added costs on the data center companies. One tech guy even proposed, in order to gain wider acceptance, having the data center companies pay the whole electric bill for the town, so that data centers = 0 electric bills for residents.
The text of the article indicates that the county government sent this message to all government facilities, but I suppose that doesn't make for quite as sexy a headline and a public school is technically a government facility.
I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world for them to illuminate that we don't need to do this?
News orgs hardly make any money. There are a few big players, but everyone outside that ring is borderline starving.
So the best way to keep money coming in is to read the vibes of social media, and print stories that fuel those fires. Basically manufacture stories using well established marketing and propaganda techniques to maximize click rates.
Ice cream man selling ice pops in the park becomes "Man seen using treats to lure young children to his van in the park".
It's not that rural, it's in the Richmond Metro Area. A quick look at satellite view shows suburbia, not rural, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there's some parts of the county with larger lots. Virginia has good connectivity for data centers, so I'm not surprised there's lots on the outskirts of their capital. I bet they've got at least 37 warehouses too.
The whole thing seems pretty overblown: County where energy prices are up 25% sends a memo asking employees to conserve electricity doesn't seem worth writing about. If prices are up 25%, I bet the datacenter guys are also working on efficiency. The county isn't asking datacenter peeps to conserve energy, because the county isn't paying their electricity bill.
From the headline, I thought this was going to be schools that signed up to participate in demand response in return for reduced electric rates are being asked to reduce their demand. Growing up in socal, most of the schools were on demand response programs, and sometimes we'd have reduced lighting as a result. I wouldn't expect a lot of datacenters to participate in demand response programs, so the angle would be 'the schools have to turn off their lights, but the datacenters don't do anything' ... ignoring the cost savings the schools signed up for; some datacenters could participate though --- large operators can move traffic and shutdown, idle or limit power for most of the servers, or can switch to local generation; but facilities for small hosting / colocation probably don't have enough insight into their customer loads to move traffic and might not want to run their generators.
What is your complaint exactly? Is it better that this includes all government services? I think most folks would not immediately think of schools if the headline said “county government buildings”. I think it’s a reasonable editorial choice to emphasize school buildings in the headline.
Some of the data centers now run disconnected on gas turbines 24/7, which is better for electricity prices but they can be big nuisance for people living nearby.
Interestingly, San Francisco has built no more of these AI datacenters and has seen a rate hike larger than that over the last few years. If we could at least get a few more datacenters that would be nice considering the rate hikes approved here.
That's because San Francisco subsidizes the rest of the state, PG&E is a state-wide utility. San Francisco is attempting to run its own utility, but is meeting resistance from PG&E and the parts of the state SF subsidizes.
First of all, the grid is interconnected. Some random city building an AI datacenter could absolutely trigger price increases in a different part of the state. Second of all, Novva Data Centers is in fact building a $500m campus. In addition to all that is that the war against Iran is causing electricity prices to spike basically everywhere. PG&E is also currently modernizing its grid and doing wildfire hardening across the state. The solar subsidies has also meant that grid subsidization costs have been shifted onto non-solar customers.
I love California and occasionally think about moving there. But the cost of living considerations bring me back to reality. Despite all its problems, it's difficult to leave Texas due to the low cost of living (and HEB!)
In much the same way that letting a fart out makes sense even when you're in a hurricane.
The list they give is overwhelmingly dominated by one item:
“Turn off your lights when leaving your workspace, including when you leave for the day. Turn off your computers/laptops at the end of each workday. If your workspace has windows, adjust the blinds to manage heat from sunlight. Unplug any appliances, chargers, or other electrical items when they are not in use. Please limit use of (or refrain altogether from using) space heaters. A typical space heater alone can cost the county from $150 to $300 per year in electricity costs.”
Lights, these days, are going to be in the order of 10 W. A space heater, 1000-3000.
$20 of AI tokens over a month? Probably somewhere between, on average, 40-320 W, depending on how you weight the cost of training and which recent-ish model you're using.
Tokenmaxxers? They're the heavy users. $2k/month (or whatever) gets you a lot of electricity through those GPUs.
Yes, absolutely. This memo implies that with the same measures they could have saved 80% of the amount, regardless of the rate change. If that is significant they should have done this long ago.
Virginia (Dominion) electric rates went up dramatically, and are now in the same rough price band as 29 other states, because they were well below average. Important context, in my humble opinion.
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.
And 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 a lot of factors at play here.
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/factors-influencing-recent-...
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.
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])
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.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446439
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48401477
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.
The greed with which the tech companies and data center providers are consuming electricity will be their downfall. By trying to make a few extra bucks by passing on some of the costs to consumers, it will trigger a huge political backlash that will screw them all. The fact they don't realize this is greed and hubris on their part.
Consumers should consider cancelling their AI subscriptions if they don't like datacenters.
Curiously, also taking place in Virginia, I just a local newspaper was bought out and fired their few journalists after they did an investigative piece on a google datacenters being built in the community.
February: https://www.roanokerambler.com/water-authority-releases-goog...
April: https://cardinalnews.org/2026/04/14/former-roanoke-rambler-o...
This tells me they know what they're doing is unpopular and are willing to squash any opposition.
If everyone turned off their lights 100% of the time they left their workstation, they could power those additional data centers for about one second.
Turn off computers and phones. No need for DCs then.
Just use smart lights that feed video into an llm to check if lights should shut down.
Billionaries are willing to have us make that sacrifice!
not to mention you'll get much farther, faster & easier with timers on the lights than some sort of 100% voluntary participation dream.
ever been in a room of people sitting in cubicles where the lights are controlled by motion sensor to automatically turn off the lights after a set period of no motion? fun times. it took way longer to get that switch replaced than it should have
I was a contractor at Sun in '97, Palo Alto campus. Initially they put me in a shared office, and that was ok. Later, I got moved to a hallway.
My machine had a hard reboot that first night... I lost my unsaved work and at that point I made it a point of religiously saving my work each evening when I went home... because each night my machine rebooted.
One day it was rather quiet. Might have been day before a long weekend, but it was a slow day in the building - very few people were walking about. I was working... and then my machine lost power. I stood up to figure out what was going on and my machine got power back. Ok... followed power cords to the wall. It was plugged into a gray outlet (rather than white outlet). The gray outlets were hooked up to the motion sensor that was for the hall lighting.
Yes there are a bunch of terrible ideas in this thread. Video camera controlled lights? Yes f privacy of everyone to save a few bucks? well I think that was sarcastic
Motion controlled lights are always timed badly, incredibly annoying to have them switch off when you are sitting still working or taking a duece.
How about the janitor shuts off the lights after everyone goes home?
"Who needs public schools anyway? I pay my kid's teachers salary directly."
And the rest has AI. All is fine. /s
Those aren’t the same unit.
“Everyone turned off their lights” relates to power.
“Power datacenters for one second” relates to energy.
You dropped the time component from the first, so yes, the result is incomparable.
“Power spent on lighting worstations while vacant” is energy
I don't think so, "while vacant" is an infinite amount of time, if you look infinitely far into the future.
I think the issues are exacerbated by the US going from "regular growth in electricity generation" for decades to "dead flat" for the last ~2 decades. I think we're finding generation isn't just a switch you turn on and reap the benefits of overnight if it's not what you were already planning on doing https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/e...
Part of solving that may be in what the article touches on - how to get the generation built before the DC shows up rather than as a promise after.
You want to use a lot of electricity? Great! We sell electricity. We will need cash in advance to handle some upgrades, rather than passing those costs on to other rate payers.
Exactly! Everyone's been conditioned that Data Centers = higher electric bills for residents. Of course, another option is for politicians to put any added costs on the data center companies. One tech guy even proposed, in order to gain wider acceptance, having the data center companies pay the whole electric bill for the town, so that data centers = 0 electric bills for residents.
The text of the article indicates that the county government sent this message to all government facilities, but I suppose that doesn't make for quite as sexy a headline and a public school is technically a government facility.
I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world for them to illuminate that we don't need to do this?
News orgs hardly make any money. There are a few big players, but everyone outside that ring is borderline starving.
So the best way to keep money coming in is to read the vibes of social media, and print stories that fuel those fires. Basically manufacture stories using well established marketing and propaganda techniques to maximize click rates.
Ice cream man selling ice pops in the park becomes "Man seen using treats to lure young children to his van in the park".
Honest headline, criminally misleading takeaway.
> I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world
Like 37 data centres in a small rural county?
It's not that rural, it's in the Richmond Metro Area. A quick look at satellite view shows suburbia, not rural, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there's some parts of the county with larger lots. Virginia has good connectivity for data centers, so I'm not surprised there's lots on the outskirts of their capital. I bet they've got at least 37 warehouses too.
The whole thing seems pretty overblown: County where energy prices are up 25% sends a memo asking employees to conserve electricity doesn't seem worth writing about. If prices are up 25%, I bet the datacenter guys are also working on efficiency. The county isn't asking datacenter peeps to conserve energy, because the county isn't paying their electricity bill.
From the headline, I thought this was going to be schools that signed up to participate in demand response in return for reduced electric rates are being asked to reduce their demand. Growing up in socal, most of the schools were on demand response programs, and sometimes we'd have reduced lighting as a result. I wouldn't expect a lot of datacenters to participate in demand response programs, so the angle would be 'the schools have to turn off their lights, but the datacenters don't do anything' ... ignoring the cost savings the schools signed up for; some datacenters could participate though --- large operators can move traffic and shutdown, idle or limit power for most of the servers, or can switch to local generation; but facilities for small hosting / colocation probably don't have enough insight into their customer loads to move traffic and might not want to run their generators.
This is suburban Richmond, not a "small rural county".
What is your complaint exactly? Is it better that this includes all government services? I think most folks would not immediately think of schools if the headline said “county government buildings”. I think it’s a reasonable editorial choice to emphasize school buildings in the headline.
The ~spice~ inference must flow.
Some of the data centers now run disconnected on gas turbines 24/7, which is better for electricity prices but they can be big nuisance for people living nearby.
It is also often a violation of the Clean Air Act but we don't have good regulation in place to actually hold them accountable
In more ways than one: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus...
excess pollution and noise are more than a nuisance
Interestingly, San Francisco has built no more of these AI datacenters and has seen a rate hike larger than that over the last few years. If we could at least get a few more datacenters that would be nice considering the rate hikes approved here.
Hey, paying for blowing up towns is expensive! PG&E's gotta get the money from somewhere! /s
That's because San Francisco subsidizes the rest of the state, PG&E is a state-wide utility. San Francisco is attempting to run its own utility, but is meeting resistance from PG&E and the parts of the state SF subsidizes.
public infrastructure should be owned by the public
First of all, the grid is interconnected. Some random city building an AI datacenter could absolutely trigger price increases in a different part of the state. Second of all, Novva Data Centers is in fact building a $500m campus. In addition to all that is that the war against Iran is causing electricity prices to spike basically everywhere. PG&E is also currently modernizing its grid and doing wildfire hardening across the state. The solar subsidies has also meant that grid subsidization costs have been shifted onto non-solar customers.
Well I think the problem there is called “welcome to California.”
I love California and occasionally think about moving there. But the cost of living considerations bring me back to reality. Despite all its problems, it's difficult to leave Texas due to the low cost of living (and HEB!)
I pay over $0.51/kWh in electricity thanks to PG&E.
I might argue that we already have data centers, we just call then Colo Facilities.
I'd imagine your normal Colo facility uses a lot less power than an AI data center.
Maybe the county could just ask its employees to work from home so that its office electricity bill goes down to zero. A win-win solution!
Unplug the data centers instead.
Conserving energy makes sense regardless of nearby data center electricity consumption.
In much the same way that letting a fart out makes sense even when you're in a hurricane.
The list they give is overwhelmingly dominated by one item:
Lights, these days, are going to be in the order of 10 W. A space heater, 1000-3000.$20 of AI tokens over a month? Probably somewhere between, on average, 40-320 W, depending on how you weight the cost of training and which recent-ish model you're using.
Tokenmaxxers? They're the heavy users. $2k/month (or whatever) gets you a lot of electricity through those GPUs.
True. But asking schools to conserve electricity while encouraging data centers to waste it is perverse.
Yes, absolutely. This memo implies that with the same measures they could have saved 80% of the amount, regardless of the rate change. If that is significant they should have done this long ago.
Virginia (Dominion) electric rates went up dramatically, and are now in the same rough price band as 29 other states, because they were well below average. Important context, in my humble opinion.
We can't leave money on the table for all those below average prices - so let's raise them all to the average... oh wait
Do we scale back AI slop for a few days or pull power back from schools? Easy, kids can suffer, give them some ice water.
The AI bubble can’t pop soon enough.
If we took the money Accenture spends on tokens so that their staff can convert PDFs to presentations(1) we can probably fund a school or two.
1) https://www.404media.co/the-tokenpocalypse-is-here-companies...
Maybe it would help remove useless and harmful tech from schools. Books don't need batteries.