Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation
Across the country, electricity prices have jumped more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living in the last year. That's especially painful during the dog days of summer, when air conditioners are working overtime.
Power-hungry data centers have been popping up all over, to serve the boom in artificial intelligence. The Energy Department projects data centers and other commercial customers will use more electricity than households for the first time ever next year. That's a challenge for policymakers, who have to decide how to accommodate that extra demand and who should foot the bill.
The soaring price of natural gas is also pushing power prices higher. More than 40% of electricity is generated using natural gas. As more gas is exported as liquid natural gas, the competition from foreign customers is driving up the price utilities have to pay here at home.
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-5502671/electricity-bill-high-inflation-aiOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
33 replies
So weird. It's almost like everything is somehow rising faster than inflation....
Except minimun wage... somehow that hasnt gone up at all
No, see, we can't raise minimum wage because of the - hmm, right.
Quick blame it on Obama!
It's because of her emails and his dick being on a computer!
Feels like the meaning of "inflation" has been lost somewhere in there...
The meaning of inflation these days is "whatever the corporations think they can get away with charging."
Corporations phrase it differently: the charge "what the market will support". There's a magic point in an Excel chart where the markup is as high as can be while the sales remain high enough to be profitable. This is the point striven for: maximum profit at any human or environmental cost.
Don't be silly. Women can just pop out more
slavesworkers and climate change is a hoax - floods, fires and hurricanes are a profit opportunity anyway.“Favorable market conditions”
And America was great again. The end.
Oops, everything is Argentina now
We need some sort of tax on any single location that uses above a certain threshold of electricity. I suspect that just the opposite is happening.
How odd. Welp, I guess it’s just a mystery we’ll never solve.
Hey! Who’s up for stripping some more rights away from women! Yeah!
Meanwhile, electricity generation is cheaper and more abundant than ever — thanks to renewables.
Not when AI and data centers are sucking up electricity and water faster than we can produce them.
No that just means that there's more competition for the electricity. Electricity is priced in a bid system. Price to bring another kW to market keep going down.
Too bad that hardly matters when the infrastructure is owned by monopolists.
All so AI can tell recovering addicts to have a little meth as a treat
Moderation is good advice, if they take meth a lot then they would be an addict. You should only consume one small rock a day.
Yeh so's food and heating, its amazing how everything is outpacing inflation yet somehow that's not the rate of inflation.
Yeah but we need the power to fuel the AI projects of all the billionaires and mega corps. And it's reaching its limit, so we all have to pay for it.
So yeah, just use less lights, watch less porn, but we will have AI which will replace your job in the future in return! Keep on paying!
There's a manufacturer of high voltage transmission towers I'm aware of that has seen its annual revenue double over just the last 2-3 years. It's a booming time for the electrical transmission industry. Good work if you can get it.
Didn’t Trump say he will bring prices down day one? I guess they will have to fire whoever came up with these numbers…
Evaporative coolers use a lot less power to produce a given amount of cooling than air conditioning does. As long as the relative humidity is low enough where you are and you don't need more than a given amount of cooling, that's an option.
Unfortunately, these work best in desert and mountain regions where water scarcity is becoming a bigger concern.
Cries in 75F dewpoint forecast all week 🥲
Where are the "I did this." stickers?
I'll ask Claude and Gemini to both make one for you. Then you can compare them and see which one you like more.
Last month my electric bill was a around $300, this month it's $600. 🥲
That explains why my normally 250 electric bill is now 400 a month.