Oregon Power company hikes data center bills by 30%, cuts residential electricity costs by 1.3%

I was thinking that this sounds good at face value, but it could easily just be a throwaway publicity stunt.

Let’s just make up a scenario, purely for illustrative purposes. Say our baseline is in 2022, customers paid ~100 a month in electricity. Then over the years, data centres came along, they struck deals, and individual consumers electricity bills went up to 200, which we are at today.

Then, NicePowerCompanyLLC decides to hike the prices for the datacentres by 30%, and reduce the prices by 1.3% for the residentials. That’s still 98.7% higher than the baseline before the datacentres. That’s to say, they data centres are still having their costs subsidized by regular people.

Ergo, if the prices already got hiked because of the datacentres, this tiny concession is a piss in the ocean. It’s just a publicity stunt to make themselves look better while people are still buckling under the exploitation of having to carry billion dollar industries on their backs, with no real benefit to themselves.

is the right direction but still far from the way it should be

Won’t someone think of the shareholders?!

How can you selectively all caps some words like that and not have your eye twitch?