How is this not the default?
We are doomed, what a bunch of clowns
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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politics
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Pay!? Make them BUILD 2x the capacity they need and give the rest away to the grid. Don't let them get away with using money to escape the social consequences of their choices. The responsibility to ensure they have no impact should be forced to be theirs and theirs alone.
Write laws that make them cease to exist if they don't do this.
Given we have the technology, any new construction should be required to be environmentally neutral at a minimum, ideally with ongoing improvement.
If they need to use millions of gallons of groundwater? Great, go fucking wild, but directly fund managed aquifer recharge projects to replace that groundwater at an equal or greater rate.
Increases in resource consumption should be covered entirely by the data center plus improvements to benefit the community.
No longer should big business be used as a means to siphon the value of labor and natural resources and concentrate it for selfish use by the worst of humanity.
I don't get it. Why aren't they already paying for their power? Why is this bill necessary? It sounds like common fucking sense to me, so why isn't that the default?
So who's paying for their power now?
They do pay for their power. The bill would require them to pay for grid upgrades that their usage makes necessary.
Well yeah, but my question was: why does this need a bill at all? By default they should pay for their own shit.
At least my provider, when they need to build a new plant or do capacity upgrades, they get the PSC to give them blanket increases in service charge or kWh-rate, on the basis that everybody contributes to the higher demand. Now we've got single customers claiming they want the full output of two or three power plants, and why should I pay the mortgage on those plants for 20 years? When the data center will be gone in 5?
We are.
I hear data centers are exceedingly vulnerable to sabotage
You mean vulnerable to power outages? Because "sabotage" would be illegal and all of that
Do water too.
Fuck it. Make them use renewables as well.
One step further.
Data centers must provide more clean energy to the grid than they remove.
Trying to think of a monkey’s paw situation :
The AI companies would nuke cities to change the other side of the equation.
Edit: that doesn’t work.
They would nuke the solar panels not on their property. They don’t need to provide any renewable energy if they don’t draw in any.
How about pay for ALL the power?
Nah, I think we should give them all the power. All at once.
Well if we deliver too much power all at once it'll.... Ooooooooooh.
It amazes me that they don’t. You’d think it would be ideal in fact so they can be self sufficient.
It's way more complicated to build a GW-scale power plant than a GW-scale data center, mostly because the power plant is subject to environmental studies, fuel supply, etc, so a DC looking for investors that can just say they're going to build a big warehouse, fill it with computers, and get electricity, magically, from the local utility, gets to outsource the hardest problem, and stands a better chance of getting their funding (regardless of whether they actually build anything).
I forget where I keep seeing that some huge fraction of proposed DCs will/are never built, suggesting that many of them are just investor scams. Showing their work on power supply would (presumably) make the scam harder to run.
Schiff Proposes Bill Requiring Easy Mode Copper Mines to Pay for Own Power
And water too! Especially if they waste it!
Lousy dEmOCrAtZ fascist lite GeNoSiDEee
down with the oppressor bourgeoise swine-pigs! I know everything about the American politics! voting is a scam! Newsome is evil genosider! Etc etc
What?
Stand by.
...okay
My company already does this.