Ari Peskoe:
That’s exactly the right question to be asking.
But the business model of the utility industry for now more than 100 years has been to invest in their systems and then spread those costs for everyone. That’s always thought to be the fair approach to supporting our electricity system.
And when you think about it, in a lot of ways, that is fair. So, for example, if there’s a storm in your neighborhood and a tree falls on a power line and the lights go out in your neighborhood, the utility comes to fix that, but it doesn’t bill you and everyone in your neighborhood for that. Rather, it spreads the cost of those repairs to everybody.
And that you know is seen to be fair, because certainly you did nothing wrong when that tree falls down. And so that idea of spreading costs through everyone, when the utility needs to expand the system, it doesn’t just charge the new residences or new businesses that are joining the system, but, again, it spreads those costs to everyone.
We’re in a bit of a new situation here when you have individual facilities, these data centers, that are using as much electricity as large cities, and they happen to be supporting the wealthiest corporations in the world. I think we need to revisit some of these fundamental assumptions behind how we share the costs of our power system.
