There's a strong case that road traffic increases to meet road building, much as public use of AP expands as AI centres are built and dependencies built into every new bit of IT tat.
Labubu dolls are the fastest growing recent fad ..
>Labubu dolls are the fastest growing recent fad ..
People like cute things and people like to gamble. It's not surprising people are getting their fix via something like that.
People like cute things and people like to gamble. It's not surprising people are getting their fix via something like that.
But that is behavior distinct from real need .. what happens, for example, should AI suddenly disappear for everybody save for a few in, say, code generation or other low population applications?
Will the world end?
I don’t agree with the premise of this article. Of course they will “include these costs” for all ratepayers because the alternative would be Meta (or whoever) just buys all the electricity (or at least a much greater share). Of course ratepayers share in the cost of building new infra because the equilibrium price of electricity has gone up.
https://world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/world...
The cost of the nuclear fuel is more-or-less a rounding error. On the other hand, personnel has to be paid no matter at what load the reactor is operating, and paying back the construction loan is also a fixed monthly fee.
This means running a nuclear reactor at 10% costs about the same as running it at 100%, so running it at anything but full capacity means you are losing out on potential income. Running it at 10% capacity means having to sell that electricity at 10x the usual rate!
Combine this with the incredibly high risks involved in such a massive long-term investment, and most reactors operate on a "strike price" principle: they negotiate a fixed electricity rate with the government, and the government has to pay (or gets to keep) the difference between the market rate and the strike price. More importantly, this applies to all the electricity the reactor could sell: if the reactor is able to generate power but the grid operator for one reason or another wants to source it somewhere else, the reactor operator still gets paid.
All this means nuclear reactors can only really be used to supply base load. In an ideal world we'd want to use them as peaker plants to make up for deficiencies left by solar and wind, but in practice we'll be turning off wind farms to let nuclear reactors run. Nuclear power might've made sense a couple of decades ago, but there just isn't a place for them left in a modern renewable-heavy grid.
And indeed, what you describe is exactly how it goes, nuclear power pretty much dictates the price of energy because it is the most expensive form. This is the big controversy of market based energy pricing to me. It should be the cheapest energy source that determines the price, not one of the most expensive ones.
https://neon.energy/Blume-Werry-Faber-Hirth-Huber-Everts-202...
I also remembered seeing several articles about a crypto mining operation doing exactly that.
- https://ignition-news.com/talen-energy-buys-out-a-nuclear-po...
- https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10052025/new-york-bitcoin...
- https://www.power-eng.com/nuclear/nuclear-powered-bitcoin-mi...
- https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/12/texas-power-plant-ex...
That last one is actually just a natural gas plant though.
There are some efforts in that direction though:
https://neutronbytes.com/2025/05/07/google-plans-three-600-m...
And I'm aware of a much smaller scale project in Europe besides this one and there are probably others.
However if utility companies do get subsidies to spend on infra, then it doesn't matter how much electricity a person buys, the money is coming from taxes separately from how much electricity anyone is buying. This would allow large consumers to take advantage of tax payers to build the infra to shift out the supply, which mostly benefits the large consumers.
The TLDR is that this is a known drawback of utility monopolies and subsidies, and if you took those away it wouldn't matter how much electricity anyone was using, it would all sort itself out with prices.
Most places are not set up for that, and giving a power company a monopoly is a necessary evil. That's not a solution without a tradeoff though. When you have a monopoly, the consumers need to collectively negotiate prices. Part of that negotiation can lead to other forms of rent-seeking in the form of subsidies, or whatever else. It's just trading problems for problems.
What might a better solution look like? Having municipalities own the last mile, and take ownership of the grid might eliminate the need for energy monopolies. Multiple energy suppliers could compete, and the grid would be maintained through contractors. The contractors hired to tend to the lines and conduits wouldn't be in the power business, they would be in the plumbing and wiring business. There is a state monopoly on the grid infrastructure, the same way there is a state monopoly on roads. There's no government truck or car monopoly even though that's what uses the roads.
For basically everything else it’s prohibitively expensive in capex terms - you really only ever can have one.
who is for subjects, whom is for objects. The answer to your query is the subject that is buying the electricity.
I thought most utilities weren't allowed to increase rates to fund new development and that's semi an issue for new nuclear plants because you can't add say 1 cent to everybody's bill to finance the loan until after it's been built. Which many people argue is a good thing considering America's inability to stick to a budget and inability to achieve economics of scale.
Although even if it's false. Adding more demand without a corresponding increase in supply leads to a price increase and I'd suspect most residential power demand is inelastic (hence the issue for Griddy customers during Texas's winter storms) so you're going to feel it for a different reason.
However, the utility rates are regulated, and the regulators allow the power companies to charge customers more to recoup any capital expenditures. Presumably when demand increases, the utilities increase capex to meet the demand.
The public utility commissions of the US are remarkably corrupt.
Company decides to brick a popular product? Who picks up the landfill tab?
Your electricity one is a good example
Hell, even RTO - SF offered some pretty nice tax incentives for companies who enforced RTO to “revive” the city. Who pays for this? They did a great job keeping those on the DL
I only know because I happened be involved in those conversations on the periphery - it was no coincidence we started an RTO policy right as we got a huge, huge new office
When you are rich enough you can just borrow using your wealth as collateral and never incur in capital gains.
Let's start by saying the amount they would pay if lobbying was what it was meant to be and not an overtly corrupt shitshow
> why cannot it not just be paid on the individual side by capital gains on share holders or wage income for workers
Ah right, the trickle down economics, forgot about that. I'm sure that will work out well
Also, road wear scales with the fourth power of axle load. This means a 3-axle 30-tonne truck causes 15.000 times the wear of a 2-axle 2-tonne car. Even if highways are currently "nearly free" to maintain with a car-dominated traffic mix, moving all that rail transport into heavy trucks is going to rapidly make highway maintenance costs explode.
There's also a push to create a new rate for very big power users, beyond the existing rate that's shared with many industrial/manufacturing users. https://wtop.com/virginia/2025/09/dominion-proposes-higher-u...
Power rates have been going way up and up for consumers in the area. We're still nowhere near CA levels of absurd, but it sucks a lot seeing the merciless tick up year after year. After being a pretty reasonably priced power area for so long. It sucks feeling like only worse & worse pain is on the way.
Building in the EU would mean a lot more compliance-y things. Building in developing countries means more stability risk, plus unreliable electricity.
[dupe]
Recent and related discussions:
Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44931763
Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595
The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910562
AI is booming so are household utility bills
aj7•16h ago