Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Some US Electricity Prices are Rising -- But It's Not Just Data
Centers

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/26/...

North Dakota experienced an almost 40% increase in electricity demand "thanks
in part to an explosion of data centers," reports the Washington Post. Yet
the state saw a 1% drop in its per kilowatt-hour rates. "A new study from
researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the consulting group
Brattle suggests that, counterintuitively, more electricity demand can
actually lower prices..." Between 2019 and 2024, the researchers calculated,
states with spikes in electricity demand saw lower prices overall. Instead,
they found that the biggest factors behind rising rates were the cost of
poles, wires and other electrical equipment - as well as the cost of
safeguarding that infrastructure against future disasters... [T]he largest
costs are fixed costs - that is, maintaining the massive system of poles and
wires that keeps electricity flowing. That system is getting old and is under
increasing pressures from wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather.
More power customers, therefore, means more ways to divvy up those fixed
costs. "What that means is you can then take some of those fixed
infrastructure costs and end up spreading them around more megawatt-hours
that are being sold - and that can actually reduce rates for everyone," said
Ryan Hledik [principal at Brattle and a member of the research team]... [T]he
new study shows that the costs of operating and installing wind, natural gas,
coal and solar have been falling over the past 20 years. Since 2005,
generation costs have fallen by 35 percent, from $234 billion to $153
billion. But the costs of the huge wires that transmit that power across the
grid, and the poles and wires that deliver that electricity to customers, are
skyrocketing. In the past two decades, transmission costs nearly tripled;
distribution costs more than doubled. Part of that trend is from the rising
costs of parts: The price of transformers and wires, for example, has far
outpaced inflation over the past five years. At the same time, U.S. utilities
haven't been on top of replacing power poles and lines in the past, and are
now trying to catch up. According to another report from Brattle, utilities
are already spending more than $10 billion a year replacing aging
transmission lines. And finally, escalating extreme-weather events are
knocking out local lines, forcing utilities to spend big to make fixes. Last
year, Hurricane Beryl decimated Houston's power grid, forcing months of
costly repairs. The threat of wildfires in the West, meanwhile, is making
utilities spend billions on burying power lines. According to the Lawrence
Berkeley study, about 40 percent of California's electricity price increase
over the last five years was due to wildfire-related costs. Yet the
researchers tell the Washington Post that prices could still increase if
utilities have to quickly build more infrastructure just to handle data
center. But their point is "This is a much more nuanced issue than just, 'We
have a new data center, so rates will go up.'" As the article points out,
"Generous subsidies for rooftop solar also increased rates in certain states,
mostly in places such as California and Maine... If customers install rooftop
solar panels, demand for electricity shrinks, spreading those fixed costs
over a smaller set of consumers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528