The U.S state of Oregon just did something I've been waiting for someone to have the guts to do.
Data centres are power hogs, everyone knows it. And when they build one, if you live near it, your bill tends to creep up. The utility has to spend big money on new substations and lines just to feed the thing so you end up subsidising a GPU farm you never agreed to.
Oregon's answer is the POWER Act. Their biggest utility, PGE, now charges data centres 29.7% more for power and drops residential rates by 1.3%. Anything pulling more than 20MW gets its own rate class. If you're the one forcing the grid upgrade, you pay for the grid upgrade.
Under the old setup, regular homeowners were paying more than double the per-kWh rate that data centres paid. Households subsidising billion dollar companies. The residential saving is tiny, about two bucks a month, but the real value is the precedent. PGE is only the first Oregon utility through the door, and other states are watching.
PGE's data centre load went from about 50MW in 2020 to over 300MW by the middle of last year. That's like plugging in 240,000 new homes in five years.
I'm hoping that this type of policy has another effect though. Cheap power makes engineers lazy. Put a proper price on it and suddenly there's a reason to build better chips, smarter cooling, leaner models. There's nothing like a good set of constraints to promote innovation!
The U.S state of Oregon just did something I've been waiting for someone to have the guts to do.
Data centres are power hogs, everyone knows it. And when they build one, if you live near it, your bill tends to creep up. The utility has to spend big money on new substations and lines just to feed the thing so you end up subsidising a GPU farm you never agreed to.
Oregon's answer is the POWER Act. Their biggest utility, PGE, now charges data centres 29.7% more for power and drops residential rates by 1.3%. Anything pulling more than 20MW gets its own rate class. If you're the one forcing the grid upgrade, you pay for the grid upgrade.
Under the old setup, regular homeowners were paying more than double the per-kWh rate that data centres paid. Households subsidising billion dollar companies. The residential saving is tiny, about two bucks a month, but the real value is the precedent. PGE is only the first Oregon utility through the door, and other states are watching.
PGE's data centre load went from about 50MW in 2020 to over 300MW by the middle of last year. That's like plugging in 240,000 new homes in five years.
I'm hoping that this type of policy has another effect though. Cheap power makes engineers lazy. Put a proper price on it and suddenly there's a reason to build better chips, smarter cooling, leaner models. There's nothing like a good set of constraints to promote innovation!