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Capacity shortfalls and needs to conserve (i.e., asking customers to reduce usage) are not necessarily 1:1 with rate increases and overall electricity costs. Especially in the short term.

In other words, large “base loads” like data centers could both reduce the average power bill AND contribute to capacity shortages and load shedding.

So don't allow data centers to connect until enough clean energy has been brought online to meet their needs without impacting cost or availability for retail ratepayers. It's easy really. Say no.

It's so strange to me that the argument previously was "we don't have enough energy generation for EVs and heat pumps to electrify and decarbon" but data centers are thought of as must run load that everyone has to suffer in some way to enable (through increased rates or risk of blackouts), when they have very little positive impact for everyone except a small minority investing in them.

> It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are a lot of factors at play here.

It is because they are the problem. We need as much clean energy as quickly as possible to mitigate climate change, we do not need data centers, broadly speaking.

(if you replaced all of the farmland/ag land, the size of the state of Oregon, harvested for ethanol with solar, you would have more electrical generation than all current US electrical generation combined as of this comment; this is simply a question of will, proven by China's solar PV deployment rates [installing ~90-100GW of solar PV per month])

Consumers should consider cancelling their AI subscriptions if they don't like datacenters.

Curiously, also taking place in Virginia, I just a local newspaper was bought out and fired their few journalists after they did an investigative piece on a google datacenters being built in the community.

February: https://www.roanokerambler.com/water-authority-releases-goog...

April: https://cardinalnews.org/2026/04/14/former-roanoke-rambler-o...

This tells me they know what they're doing is unpopular and are willing to squash any opposition.

Just use smart lights that feed video into an llm to check if lights should shut down.

Turn off computers and phones. No need for DCs then.

Billionaries are willing to have us make that sacrifice!

not to mention you'll get much farther, faster & easier with timers on the lights than some sort of 100% voluntary participation dream.

"Who needs public schools anyway? I pay my kid's teachers salary directly."

Those aren’t the same unit.

“Everyone turned off their lights” relates to power.

“Power datacenters for one second” relates to energy.

Exactly! Everyone's been conditioned that Data Centers = higher electric bills for residents. Of course, another option is for politicians to put any added costs on the data center companies. One tech guy even proposed, in order to gain wider acceptance, having the data center companies pay the whole electric bill for the town, so that data centers = 0 electric bills for residents.

News orgs hardly make any money. There are a few big players, but everyone outside that ring is borderline starving.

So the best way to keep money coming in is to read the vibes of social media, and print stories that fuel those fires. Basically manufacture stories using well established marketing and propaganda techniques to maximize click rates.

Ice cream man selling ice pops in the park becomes "Man seen using treats to lure young children to his van in the park".

Honest headline, criminally misleading takeaway.

404media is heavily invested in the anti-datacenter reporting. I'm still subscribed to their RSS feed and like half the posts are datacenter focused (often with a misleading angle).

> I appreciate 404 media's mission but isn't there enough stupid shit existing naturally in the world

Like 37 data centres in a small rural county?

What is your complaint exactly? Is it better that this includes all government services? I think most folks would not immediately think of schools if the headline said “county government buildings”. I think it’s a reasonable editorial choice to emphasize school buildings in the headline.

That's because San Francisco subsidizes the rest of the state, PG&E is a state-wide utility. San Francisco is attempting to run its own utility, but is meeting resistance from PG&E and the parts of the state SF subsidizes.

First of all, the grid is interconnected. Some random city building an AI datacenter could absolutely trigger price increases in a different part of the state. Second of all, Novva Data Centers is in fact building a $500m campus. In addition to all that is that the war against Iran is causing electricity prices to spike basically everywhere. PG&E is also currently modernizing its grid and doing wildfire hardening across the state. The solar subsidies has also meant that grid subsidization costs have been shifted onto non-solar customers.

Well I think the problem there is called “welcome to California.”

I love California and occasionally think about moving there. But the cost of living considerations bring me back to reality. Despite all its problems, it's difficult to leave Texas due to the low cost of living (and HEB!)

I might argue that we already have data centers, we just call then Colo Facilities.

Hey, paying for blowing up towns is expensive! PG&E's gotta get the money from somewhere! /s

It is also often a violation of the Clean Air Act but we don't have good regulation in place to actually hold them accountable

In more ways than one: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/13/elon-mus...

excess pollution and noise are more than a nuisance

In much the same way that letting a fart out makes sense even when you're in a hurricane.

The list they give is overwhelmingly dominated by one item:

  “Turn off your lights when leaving your workspace, including when you leave for the day. Turn off your computers/laptops at the end of each workday.  If your workspace has windows, adjust the blinds to manage heat from sunlight.  Unplug any appliances, chargers, or other electrical items when they are not in use. Please limit use of (or refrain altogether from using) space heaters. A typical space heater alone can cost the county from $150 to $300 per year in electricity costs.”

$20 of AI tokens over a month? Probably somewhere between, on average, 40-320 W, depending on how you weight the cost of training and which recent-ish model you're using.

Tokenmaxxers? They're the heavy users. $2k/month (or whatever) gets you a lot of electricity through those GPUs.

True. But asking schools to conserve electricity while encouraging data centers to waste it is perverse.

Yes, absolutely. This memo implies that with the same measures they could have saved 80% of the amount, regardless of the rate change. If that is significant they should have done this long ago.

We can't leave money on the table for all those below average prices - so let's raise them all to the average... oh wait

If we took the money Accenture spends on tokens so that their staff can convert PDFs to presentations(1) we can probably fund a school or two.

1) https://www.404media.co/the-tokenpocalypse-is-here-companies...

Maybe it would help remove useless and harmful tech from schools. Books don't need batteries.