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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20941 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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I can only speak for the data centers I've been involved with, but it has amazed me how little effort has been put into trying to counter or at least mitigate the most excessive claims of critics. Frankly, the complacency of these tech companies is kind of driving me crazy, though I have some ideas I want to push. We don't need to make people like data centers, we just need more people to utter the words "I don't like data centers, but..."

I'll paraphrase something I read on Twitter recently: Currently, 80 IQ cartel narcoterrorists have a better idea of civic duty that the tech oligarchs. When your town gets taken over by the cartel, at least they bring electricity, hospitals, running water, and a level of stability. Because even the lowest scum drug runner knows that they need to at least give something back to the community they exist in. Tech oligarchs will go into a community, drive up utility prices, and call anyone who isn't enthusiastically supportive a luddite who deserves to rot in the permanent underclass. In this way, the drug cartels are closer to the likes of John D. Rockefeller than anyone alive in Silicon Valley.

The problem with this is the electricity rate increases haven't actually materialized. They're all projections. And future impacts, in theory and in practice, fairly easy to avoid; the permitting authority has to structure things so the data center pays their own way. This should not be that hard, the data center builders currently have a lot of cash to throw around. So it amounts to a opposition talking point, like the water.

I work in energy (electricity) and this is part true and part untrue. Yes, electricity prices have gone up modestly, with bigger increases projected in the next 5 years.

The reasons prices are set to increase is that we are really slow to put new generation on the grid. And the amount of data centers under construction, let alone planned, is much bigger than what is already operational.

It’s a very simple supply and demand function. Load increases faster than supply. DCs buy power through PPA contracts directly with generators. But that crowds out offtake from the generators that would otherwise go to merchant markets or supply agreements with utilities.

We are average at best at building new power supply.

I expect retail electricity prices to be electoral politics by 2030, maybe even 2028.

Existing electricity price increases aren't correlated to data center builds, however. And of course we're slow to put new generation on the grid; environmentalists.

Making datacenters build grid improvements is a real idea that's been floated around.

If you make them build grid improvements (which amounts to money and partnerships with existing firms which do such things; they're not going to do the actual grid improvements any more than Microsoft is restarting TMI), but don't LET them build grid improvements (because environment, safety, union work rules, etc), you've just banned them in a more complicated way.

But datacenters obviously will get built, even if people don't like it- tying grid improvements to them is the best way to make sure grid improvements actually happen.

Sure, and it makes perfect sense if someone wants to attach an enormous data center to your grid to do just that. However, the electricity complaints aren't the real objection any more than the water complaints are. It's just a nebulous NO with the specific complaints being the rationalizing faces of it, and so you can expect "making data centers build grid improvements" to come alongside "don't allow grid improvements" because the reason for such requirements is to block the datacenters.

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