HN Reader

Oregon passed a bill during the recent legislative session that aims to make users like those pay their fair share, rather than jacking up prices for everyone

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/05/oregon-data-centers-c...

It seems, according to the article, that the local energy operator is a bigger problem than just growing demand from AI - they don’t seem to manage the energy transformation competently, and the issues began pre-chatbots.

“In 2022, PJM stopped processing new applications for power plant connections after it was overloaded with more than 2,000 requests from renewable power projects, each of which required engineering studies before they could connect to the grid”

Electricity prices are static since at least the 70s https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-...

Total electric production is stagnant over the same period https://www.iea.org/countries/united-states/electricity

If you want to grow value in an economy, how do you do it without growing energy supply and reducing energy cost? Intensive growth (the economist's answer to infinite growth on a finite planet) can only do so much for an economy as we continually add more valuable things to spend energy inputs on.

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

Large data centers may have to go on interruptable power, and shut down servers during peak electricity load periods. Steel mills do that.

How hard would it be to power all data centers via solar panels attached to batteries?

The area of solar panels needed to power data centers is .. maybe 100x the area of the data center?

Only a tiny percentage of the USA is covered by data centers. Maybe 100 million square meters? That would be something like 0.001%.

Then covering 0.1% of the USA with solar panels could power all data centers.

Dyson. Sphere.

Why do we stall human progress and not get started on this end state tech yesterday? It is the key to a functioning singularity.

And the kicker? It’s easy. We already have all necessary parts available off shelf. And it’s green, ain’t no pollution like space pollution.

I am sure it will all be worth it for a Ghiblified photo of yourself

Surely this is a problem with the power company selling more power than they have available?

It's not like a datacenter just takes power with no oversight, they have to be given a tie-in to the grid of a certain size first by the power company.