I don’t really get how the fig leaf of “due to data-centers” is even supposed to work.
They get more demand, so more revenue. Then the fixed costs of the business are spread over more revenue, which is supposed to make the prices better not worse.
I know the profit motive is just extracting whatever the market will bear, but could anyone still explain the reasoning they are trying to make customers believe?
This seems really super straight forward. Demand increases, price increases. Why would you sell your labor for less than the max you can get? If another company offers you twice your salay, are you declining?
This isn’t even a capitalist thing. Markets and supply and demand have existed long before capitalism, or socialism.
It’s the same reason rents are high in cities. If 100 houses need to be distributed to 1000 families, you need a mechanism to “get rid” of 900. Increasing the price for the rare commodity is one of the options, a lottery like in the DDR is another.
It can depend, also this little snippet doesn’t say if it’s energy or delivery. Some utilities really like expanding delivery because the projects are revenue, and they don’t make much, if any, on the delivery. But in some cases those delivery expansion projects have a long payback time, so they avoid them until they’re critical, and also lose if after building the demand they were serving goes down.
It also varies a ton by state (Texas being the most extreme example). As well as, someone noted below, how the energy purchase goes. In my state there’s an independent not for profit that is not the utility, and not the energy producer, that just coordinates purchase of power from the broader region (across multiple states). They’ll mix whats coming into the grid in the state going “call Ohio and buy XXYY megawatts for ZZ hrs from that coal fire joint”. The control room is cool as hell. They seem pretty ethically clean, but purchasing that power is a bidding process (like, real time), and your bid has to be competitive.
Somewhere at the energy company is a person or small team responsible for that message. And those are regular people who also are getting fucked in the ass. Carefully crafted to keep their job (shifting the blame away from the utility slightly), while also letting everyone know who’s dick it is in their bumbum
I don’t really get how the fig leaf of “due to data-centers” is even supposed to work.
They get more demand, so more revenue. Then the fixed costs of the business are spread over more revenue, which is supposed to make the prices better not worse.
I know the profit motive is just extracting whatever the market will bear, but could anyone still explain the reasoning they are trying to make customers believe?
That’s the neat part, they don’t have to bother with that!
probably need to build new power plants while the existing ones are in overdrive
they could handle that diffeently, bug fleecing regular joe is more fun
It let’s them increase their extortionary price hike by more, and blame it on a different extortionist.
This seems really super straight forward. Demand increases, price increases. Why would you sell your labor for less than the max you can get? If another company offers you twice your salay, are you declining?
This isn’t even a capitalist thing. Markets and supply and demand have existed long before capitalism, or socialism.
It’s the same reason rents are high in cities. If 100 houses need to be distributed to 1000 families, you need a mechanism to “get rid” of 900. Increasing the price for the rare commodity is one of the options, a lottery like in the DDR is another.
It can depend, also this little snippet doesn’t say if it’s energy or delivery. Some utilities really like expanding delivery because the projects are revenue, and they don’t make much, if any, on the delivery. But in some cases those delivery expansion projects have a long payback time, so they avoid them until they’re critical, and also lose if after building the demand they were serving goes down.
It also varies a ton by state (Texas being the most extreme example). As well as, someone noted below, how the energy purchase goes. In my state there’s an independent not for profit that is not the utility, and not the energy producer, that just coordinates purchase of power from the broader region (across multiple states). They’ll mix whats coming into the grid in the state going “call Ohio and buy XXYY megawatts for ZZ hrs from that coal fire joint”. The control room is cool as hell. They seem pretty ethically clean, but purchasing that power is a bidding process (like, real time), and your bid has to be competitive.
Somewhere at the energy company is a person or small team responsible for that message. And those are regular people who also are getting fucked in the ass. Carefully crafted to keep their job (shifting the blame away from the utility slightly), while also letting everyone know who’s dick it is in their bumbum