How on this good green earth are the Oregon authorities going to work out what is "fair"? Prices are already pretty fair, the more they use the more they pay.

This is just restricting industry because they don't want to build the infrastructure to support it. Which, fair enough. At this point the fight about industrialising vs de-industrialising has been fought out. But exactly why there is this big round of chip sanctions on China when the US doesn't want to build the power plants to use them domestically will quickly become a baffler. China can build coal plants at a rate of 2/week, plus solar panels, nuclear plants and what have you. I bet they're willing to run all these data centres.

I'm cautious when I read terms like, "fair share". Perhaps the pricing is unfair in this case. However this kind of language is often deployed in political contexts. There are market based arguments for lower pricing for buying in bulk. Typically the political arguments for subsidizing industry revolve around job creation.

Ultimately, the previous pricing tiers seem to have been determined by political means. This presents a contradiction for proponents of "fair share" pricing. If the previous political process resulted in an "unfair" outcome, then why is the new politically determined outcome "more fair"? What does "fair share" really mean here? Wouldn't the previous outcome suggest that the political process has issues with creating "fair" outcomes?

I get the impression that Oregon Public Broadcasting would dismiss or even demonize market based metrics as "unfair". There also seems to be a vague sense that tech bros and cryptocurrency users have become class enemies for some political persuasions.

> "some of those cost increases [to Oregon electric consumers] came from data centers coming onto our shared grid" Wochele said

[citation needed]

The article did go on...

> According to Oregon CUB, large industrial users, like data centers, that have connected to Portland General Electric’s system pay about 8 cents per kilowatt hour, or kWH, which is the unit of energy used when 1,000 watts of power is used in an hour. Residential customers in the same PGE system pay close to 20 cents per kilowatt hour

But that's a disingenuous comparison. Data centers are cheaper to serve because there's ~one massive line going to one place, power use is generally more fixed and predictable, and they might be paying less because they can reduce power use during heat waves.

It is not just one grid operator (though some may be worse than others). Electricity demand in the US has been flat for the last 20 years[1] because all growth has been offset by efficiency gains. The same is true in Europe, e.g. Germany[2].

As a result, grid operators and lawmakers in the west have collectively forgotten how to deal with rapid growth of electricity demand.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/383650/consumption-of-el...

When you are being spammed with grifters who are basically using system inefficiencies, subsidy, and dumping externalities onto the public grid there is very little way to keep up.

If all the actors here were acting in good faith, I would agree. This is not a problem of well-sited and competently researched energy generation plans simply being held up by nothing but red tape and a rubber stamp.

There is certainly some of that, but it’s not the whole story. Operating the grid has historically taken a lot of “gentleman’s agreements” and inertia from the proper overengineering of overbuilding from generation’s past to function. Those social constructs have largely broken down by now.

When you don’t build stuff for a generation (no pun intended) you lose the ability to.

Interesting times ahead indeed.

There’s no value in doing more with less?

Take LED lighting, an absolutely enormous energy save producing better lighting than incandescent bulbs.

>Ultimately the process of taking an input and making it more valuable is an application of energy.

most of the increase in value comes out of getting more output out of the same input, which is what the application of intelligence is supposed to do. In qualitative terms this means dematerialisation. Your pocket supercomputer is more valuable than something that used to fill a stadium not because it applies more energy, but the opposite.

You used to drive your steel car with dinosaur fuel to the video rental store where you picked up plastic boxes to put into your single purpose device, now you send information through a fiber-optic cable, calculate the energy differential for that. Real civilizational progress is doing what you used to do with matter with light instead.

Datacenters already do this as matter of course. It’s more or less table stakes for a grid connection in most places, certainly if you want anything resembling best rates.