This summer, across a vast stretch of the eastern United States, monthly home electric bills jumped. In Trenton, New Jersey, the bill for a typical home rose $26. In Philadelphia, it increased about $17. In Pittsburgh, it went up $10. And in Columbus, Ohio, it spiked $27.
Few customers were happy, of course, but even fewer knew exactly why the rates had climbed so quickly.
“I never know why it goes up,” said Vicki Miller, a retired secretary in Columbus. “But I can adjust the thermostat to save money — I freeze in the winter and roast in the summer.”
This time around, though, it is possible to trace the price hikes in these cities to a specific source: the boom in data centers, those large warehouses of technology that support artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other Big Tech wonders. They consume huge amounts of electricity, and, as they proliferate, the surging demand for electricity has driven up prices for millions of people, including residential customers who may not ever use AI or cloud computing.
In Columbus, for example, households on the standard plan of the local utility began paying about $20 more a month as of June — or $240 a year — because of the demand from data centers, according to a calculation based on figures from an independent monitor overseeing the region’s energy auctions and the local utility, AEP Ohio. READ MORE...
In other news: Cheyenne to host massive AI data center using more electricity than all Wyoming homes combined. Meanwhile - we are told to turn down our air conditioning, heating, travel less, eat less meat, etc - to save the planet. Microsoft used to say that big tech (Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Quantum Computing, etc) - will save the planet. I strongly suspect big tech will do the exact opposite...
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