710
Oregon Power company hikes data center bills by 30%, cuts residential electricity costs by 1.3%
(www.tomshardware.com)
This is the way
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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I'm not even against data centers per se. I'm against the reckless unlimited building of dozens of these megastructures all at once with virtually no regulation or accountability. This is an excellent way to push the brakes and not screw the little guy in the process.
I have to say this is really shitty reporting by Tom's and OPB. Sure its a big rate increase, but they left out the part where datacenters are still paying 30% to 50% less than residential customers per kWh.
I was thinking that this sounds good at face value, but it could easily just be a throwaway publicity stunt.
Let's just make up a scenario, purely for illustrative purposes. Say our baseline is in 2022, customers paid ~100 a month in electricity. Then over the years, data centres came along, they struck deals, and individual consumers electricity bills went up to 200, which we are at today.
Then, NicePowerCompanyLLC decides to hike the prices for the datacentres by 30%, and reduce the prices by 1.3% for the residentials. That's still 98.7% higher than the baseline before the datacentres. That's to say, they data centres are still having their costs subsidized by regular people.
Ergo, if the prices already got hiked because of the datacentres, this tiny concession is a piss in the ocean. It's just a publicity stunt to make themselves look better while people are still buckling under the exploitation of having to carry billion dollar industries on their backs, with no real benefit to themselves.
This exactly covers the main issue. Much damage has already been done that the average person is just supposed to eat? Bullshit.
Most business do
Round here you get a break on industrial scale power but not really commercial scale.
Data Center: "Time to fire up the jet turbines"
This is a great first step. Next thing they need is environmental regulation with teeth.
The environmental regulation already exists. It's just not enforced.
Because federal agencies are captured by special interests and gutted.
Yeah that's what I mean. Right now they have no teeth.
I hear the waitlist on jet turbines is 2+ years....
Good, that's the way it should be.
is the right direction but still far from the way it should be
This is TERRIBLE! If we FORCE Billionaires to PAY their Bills they Might LEAVE and DROP my Bills in the Process!
-Republican Voters LITERALLY!
How can you selectively all caps some words like that and not have your eye twitch?
Won't someone think of the shareholders?!
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
I wonder how many data centres have contracts for fixed or predictable pricing agreements
Most do. Some even trade sort of electricity contracts to earn money. It is a wierd buisness.
There are dozens that have their new energy infrastructure costs and even their power usage shared among all the residents of that utility district. They're hard to find out about because the contracts are often secretive -- can't imagine why -- but this was going on for a while before people started to put up a stink about data centers.
This is a good article from about a year ago, and Benn Jordan has also talked about it on his channel, among others.