America's largest power grid is struggling to meet demand from AI: Rising prices out of the auction trickle down to everyday people's power bills.
America's largest power grid is struggling to meet demand from AI: Rising prices out of the auction trickle down to everyday people's power bills.
America's largest power grid is under strain as data centers and AI chatbots consume power faster than new plants can be built.
Electricity bills are projected to surge by more than 20% this summer in some parts of PJM Interconnection's territory, which covers 13 states - from Illinois to Tennessee, Virginia to New Jersey - serving 67 million customers in a region with the most data centers in the world.
The upheaval at PJM started a year ago with a more than 800% jump in prices at its annual capacity auction. Rising prices out of the auction trickle down to everyday people's power bills.
For context: In 2019, I was paying $0.09/KWh and today I pay about $0.29/KWh with yet another rate hike looming.
Behold, the actual “trickle down economics”.
bUt i wAs tOLd tHaT AI iSn't bAD fOr thE enViRoNmeNt 🙃
I am very happy to not be on the grid. We have a smaller setup, but it runs the AC during the day (even when we are not home) and it’s FREE.
Oh yea and during recent heat waves people in town have been having power outages, not us.
I'd love to be self-sufficient but not quite able to do so right now.
The only silver lining here is that it's lit a fire under me to get my small grid-tie solar setup out of storage (haven't installed it at my new house yet) and expand it.
When I had that running at my old house ($0.09/KWh), my 1.2 KW setup was only saving me about $7-10/mo at most, but at $0.29/KWh, I'm looking at about $27-30.
Don't you need an electrician to wire your house to tie in the panels?
Not really, unless you dont feel comfortable doing it. It's like hooking a generator to the house. You just need to connect the AC output of your inverter to the new circuit breaker in your electric panel.
In this one, it's all in the inverter. You just plug it into an outlet, and it can do up to 1000W (though 950 was the most I've ever gotten from 1.2 KW of PV coming in at ~90 volts).
You can have multiple inverters; they match the frequency and voltage of the incoming utility power and won't output anything if there's no utility power coming in (anti-islanding protection).
The only thing to be aware of is not over loading a circuit where you have them connected. I do have a dedicated circuit/outlet for that.
They're useless if the power's out, but I'm looking into something of a transfer switch to redirect the PV output from the grid-tie inverter to a regular one, but I haven't gone too far down that path yet.
Edit: It's the same principle that's used in balcony solar