Electricity Prices Are Climbing More Than Twice as Fast as Inflation (npr.org)
- Reference: 0178773238
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/08/19/2347235/electricity-prices-are-climbing-more-than-twice-as-fast-as-inflation
- Source link: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-5502671/electricity-bill-high-inflation-ai
The Energy Department projects data centers will consume more electricity than residential customers for the first time in 2026. Natural gas costs for power generation rose 40% in the first half of 2025 compared to 2024, and the department expects another 17% increase next year. Natural gas generates more than 40% of U.S. electricity. One in six households currently struggles to pay electric bills. The federal government provides $4 billion annually in energy assistance for low-income families.
Further reading : [2]Big Tech's AI Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone .
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/08/16/nx-s1-5502671/electricity-bill-high-inflation-ai
[2] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/08/14/1655246/big-techs-ai-data-centers-are-driving-up-electricity-bills-for-everyone
trump take electricity (Score:4, Funny)
“Under my administration, we will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months”
he's still got a year folks, lets just relax and bask in the greatness
Re:trump take electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
Still waiting on my grocery prices as promised on “day one” [1]https://thehill.com/homenews/n... [thehill.com]
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/5441550-trump-promised-lower-grocery-prices-on-day-one-heres-what-happened/amp/
Re: (Score:2)
Didn't you hear? The day after he moved into the White House, he suddenly realized that bring prices down is hard. Who knew?
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About them trade deals, there aren't really any. They are mostly just vague promises that he can honk on about. Europe's pols will tell you they cannot tell their companies to invest $500 Billion in the U.S. or to buy $250 Billion in carbon. A similar story with Japan, la Presidenta's $550 Billion from Japan is merely loans guarantees and they expect an equal share of any profits.....which won't happen because no one is stupid enough to loan la Presidenta money after what he did to the banks who were stupid
but isn't capitalism the most efficent system? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost like giving private, for-profit corporations monopoly ownership of essential services is a bad thing...
Re: but isn't capitalism the most efficent system? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please do show us the mental gymnastics you found to turn this into socialism!
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"Mental gymnastics" implies that a person actually engage their brain at some point instead of just parroting something they've heard.
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US energy prices have always been heavily subsidized, but by all means...
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There's no need for a "government-granted monopoly" - all "free market" systems, that is, exchanges where there are no enforceable external rules, naturally degrade into some sort of oligopoly or monopoly. It is an economic effect you simply cannot escape.
Is this also "Socialism"?
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You always treat your own speculation and oversimplification as fact, and then wonder why you always come out of it looking like a moron. Whether you end up with an oligopoly or even a monopoly really depends on both the industry and the market, and neither of these is inherently bad, either. It really depends on many things. Breaking up a natural monopoly, such as a utility provider, doesn't make any sense as all it will do is result in a less efficient means of production. As jumbo jets have become more a
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That only shows that some markets that you have no (real) competition should be done by the government. Like water, power and healthcare.
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Interestingly, Texas has an actual marketplace for retail electricity. Every electricity customer can pick from dozens of different retail electricity providers. As a result, there are many options like guaranteed fixed-rate plans, green plans, as well as gimmicky plans like free nights and weekends, or plans with rebates if you stay under a certain usage amount.
While it's not a truly capitalist market (the wholesale market is still a regional monopoly), the result has been lower prices. In Houston, for exa
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> I like my electricity co-op. I've been paying 8c/KWH for a decade and it still isn't going up
I'm paying 9. I positively shudder when I hear of people paying in the 30s, and sadly they seem to exist. A lot.
Cheap reliable electricity should not be a luxury good in a first world society. It should be a basic necessity like water. Oh yeah, I guess I should not really go there either.
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Here in The Netherlands we pay 25~30 ct per KWH. Though half of that amount is pure taxes.
On the other hand: power failures are very very rare here.
Last time the power failed here was because someone with a digger hit the neighborhood mainline. (cables are buried here)
The grid-maintainer had it fixed in like 2 hours.
Duck! (Score:2)
AI smells, waddles, quacks, swims, and farts like a bubble.
It will likely follow a similar pattern to the dot-com crash of 2000: a lot of interesting ideas are floated and tried, but the existing players don't know how to make it profitable and investors will eventually figure that out, triggering a crash. The AI server farm build craze will then freeze for roughly a decade, making power demand flat again.
Gradually better entrepreneurs and/or trial and error will figure out how to make money on AI and it wi
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Sure, but the problem with bubbles is they continue until there's free money to dump into them. Remember the decade-long Greenspan "quant ease"?
The current policy is to put another boatload or two into this crap, from the lavish government expenditures to "boost" the technology, to the tax reduction windfall, which needs to be invested somewhere.
There's no guarantee at all that the bubble will burst and restart the market in a more efficient manner anytime soon, or without a major recession in-between.
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Every now and again, Group A finds a new recipe to con (the very much larger) Group B out of their life savings.
That's the American way. Nothing to see here...
My bad (Score:2)
This is probably my fault. It's just my luck that after I owned an EV gas prices would stay relatively flat, but electricity would go through the roof.
In all seriousness though, at least here in Florida the bulk of my power usage goes towards air conditioning. At the roughly 4 miles per kWh that the Bolt gets, if the entirety of my monthly electic bill went towards car charging, that'd be enough to drive 9,840 miles. Air conditioning truly is a massive power suck.
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The silver lining (I guess) is that the more grid prices rise, the more incentive people will have to install solar panels at home to avoid paying grid prices as much as possible.
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Well one thing that would massive bring that bill down: split units and good house isolation.
Unprofitable (Score:5, Insightful)
A reminder that LLM-hawking companies are deeply, comically unprofitable right now. They're giant pits where money goes to be redistributed to NVidia and power companies, as well as huge signing bonuses for individual programmers.
Do not base your workflow or any part of your organization on anything that assumes that LLMs will be there, even on a free tier. If you can't build or maintain it yourself, it's a liability. At these rates, SOMEONE will have to pull back at some point, there's just no choice.
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That's a silly take. Same could have been said about Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and many others at one point. Most startups don't make money right out the door. But believing they'll never do so is just stupid.
And what organization is basing their workflows on free tier AI? That's hilarious.
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You are cherry-picking survivors after the fact. Many won't make it.
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Certainly most won't make it but the big AI companies, the ones using a lot of power and the ones being talked about, the ones people are using in their company workflows, they'll survive. OpenAI, Anthropic and others will most certainly be very profitable in the future.
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> That's a silly take. Same could have been said about Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and many others at one point. Most startups don't make money right out the door. But believing they'll never do so is just stupid.
I don't think his take was that AI startups will all fail; rather it was that AI (as currently implemented) costs a lot of money to run, and that cost is currently being paid by investors rather than by customers.
But the investors won't be willing to subsidize cheap/free AI forever, so at some point the cost of these AI services will rise to somewhere higher than the cost of the electricity and hardware it takes to provide them, and it would be wise to take that into account rather than assuming that today'
A.I. and intermittent sources are driving costs! (Score:1)
Demand from A.I. companies is significant. Also renewables are intermittent. So they are paired with peaking methane which is extremely expensive and dirty . Having to rely on peaking electricity every single night drives up electricity costs significantly.
If we want to lower pollution and costs we need to build new nuclear energy. Yes, nuclear. The high upfront cost of a nuclear power plant is more than made up for in the long run with low operation costs, low fuel costs, and an extremely long life
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Agree about AI. But I don't quite follow your argument about renewables. Even without them you'd still have natural gas base load power. That's certainly cleaner than coal, and it's quite cost effective. If you were referring to CO2 emissions, yes natural gas has that, but less than coal. Not sure why you tie natural gas to renewables (although they do make a good, reasonably clean pair).
Nuclear fission is the most expensive option on the table. The cost to build plants are crazy high. Extracting urani
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> But I don't quite follow your argument about renewables. Even without them you'd still have natural gas base load power.
Natural gas baseload would actually be cheaper (allthough dirtier). With peaking prices methane companies can charge whatever they want. Sometimes 50 cents a kWh. Sometimes more. That's where the price increase comes from.
> If you were referring to CO2 emissions, yes natural gas has that, but less than coal.
490 g CO2 per kWh. In order to deep decarbonize we need our entire grid to be below 50, perferably below 30, We can't do that if we burn methane every single night.
> Not sure why you tie natural gas to renewables
Because in the real world methane(natural gas) is tied to solar and wind. The sun doesn't always shine and the win
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I see. I'm totally okay with solar being paired with natural gas in the short term. The reason being that the storage issue is a solvable one. And there's a definite path forward with real public support. Investing in solar energy production and storage is a no brainer, at least for most folk. We'd be stupid to not put up more solar. Nuclear isn't so clear cut. I agree we need more nuclear. Maybe when a Democrat king gets elected he can executive order his way to building nuclear power plants. Until
Math doesn't add up (Score:4, Informative)
So, "Electricity prices have increased at more than double the inflation rate over the past year". That is probably true for some utilities. However, the specific [1]example [fpl.com] in Florida shows increases of 13.3% for one region and 5.8% for the other region over 4 years. There are various nationwide inflation metrics, but let's say the current rate is 2.7%. Over four years, that would be a price increase of 11.2%. So, for that specific Florida utility, one region would see electricity rates rise slightly over general inflation, while the other region would see an increase quite a bit below the inflation rate.
It may be true that electricity inflation is far outpacing general inflation, but the Florida example is a poor example.
[1] https://newsroom.fpl.com/2025-02-28-FPL-files-details-of-new-rate-plan-designed-to-power-growing-state-with-unmatched-combination-of-high-reliability-and-low-bills
\o/ (Score:1)
"AI is ruining eveything"
More news at ten --scratch that, all news is now provided by AI
Data Centers (Score:3)
Thanks data centers and AI centers for vacuuming up all of the energy we were supposed to be saving with more efficient appliances and LED lighting.
Earthship design = cost free cooling! (Score:4, Interesting)
Earthships use a combination of natural cooling strategies, primarily relying on underground cooling tubes and convection currents to maintain comfortable temperatures. These tubes, buried in the earth, pre-cool incoming air, while natural convection currents draw the cooled air through the building and expel warmer air. [1]https://earthship.com/2020/03/... [earthship.com]
[1] https://earthship.com/2020/03/27/cooling-tubes/
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I don't think million dollar mud huts with fancy tubing into the ground are a solve.
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That works well when cooling a small house, but fails spectacularly at even commercial scale to say nothing of industrial scale which is driving the majority of the electricity cost.
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> That works well when cooling a small house, but fails spectacularly at even commercial scale to say nothing of industrial scale which is driving the majority of the electricity cost.
This is more interesting. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Lake_Water_Cooling_System
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Does that really work in places like Florida?
Doing it wrong (Score:2)
If the price of most things is going up faster than inflation, you aren't measuring inflation correctly.
A modest proposal (Score:2)
Well, we know AI is going to put a lot of people out of work. So how about we hire some of those people to donate their body heat to generate electricity for the machines? They'd check into a big building and go into little relaxation pods that collect their heat.
We'll give them VR headsets to keep them amused. Eventually, the technology will be so good we'll be able to plug directly into their brains and they'll think they're out and about doing something while their body heat is powering the machines
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With all due respect to you and your agent friends, there are more economical ways to generate power :)
Ai and Trump (Score:2)
AI is driving up the cost of electricity and Trump isn't helping matters by shutting down large scale renewable projects because oil companies Bank rolled his campaign.
They're going to take your electricity away. It's not a question of if it's a question of whether you'll die before they get around to you personally. Water too. Those data centers are thirsty and it's cheaper to run them that way. You won't be taking showers much longer.
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Well look at it this way, your taxes mostly go towards keeping someone else from taking the rest of what you've earned. Whether the potential taker could be some other country or another American who feels like they drew the short straw in life.
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> Well look at it this way, your taxes mostly go towards keeping someone else from taking the rest of what you've earned. Whether the potential taker could be some other country or another American who feels like they drew the short straw in life.
That's what the Sicilian gentlemen with the double-breasted suits and no necks said, but they were taking a somewhat smaller cut.
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> It's TAXES!!!
Congratulations on being rich. If your tax burden outweighs your cost of living, you're richer than the majority of Americans. Maybe you, too, can make ends meet by not buying so much avocado toast...
=Smidge=
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And he could also be kicking his tax dodging mates asses so some of them start sharing the burden.
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I don't eat avocados.
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Yeah. Living large on my $81K/year. Lookout top ten richest Americans list, I'm comin for ya!!
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Why don’t you move to a country without taxes? There are a few.
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Because that would be a long commute for my child's school.
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> [Why not move to a country without taxes]Because that would be a long commute for my child's school.
Just move your kid to a local school - problem solved!
What, you say there are no good schools, because nobody pays taxes? And the only schools are private and too expensive? Geeze, I wonder how this happened!
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I send my kid to a private school.
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Good god, no. I'd never mistreat my child that way.
Local school district spends about $22K/year/student, which is about $8K/year more than our private school, and it gets absolutely miserable test scores and ratings.
I'd home school before sending him to the local public schools.
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> People are way too concerned about what they pay "private corporations" to care much about what they're paying to the government.
Not sure why this is modded troll. I'd mod you up but I've already posted.
It is unpopular to point out to people government is not your friend. They are a necessary evil with a tendency to metastasis.
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> But, what they SHOULD have done is "ramp up" alternatives until they could provide adequate power generation.
That's very funny, because they are curtailing the alternatives because they generate too much electricity! We have high prices because commodity brokers arbitrarily set them and cook the books to rationalize it, and now we are subsidizing big data. It's grand theft
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> That's very funny, because they are curtailing the alternatives because they generate too much electricity!
Sooner or later some bright individual will realize that instead of dumping that excess electricity, they could be using it to mine Bitcoins, or electrolyze hydrogen out of seawater, or (insert your favorite low-priority process here).
Curtailing electricity generation in an era where electricity is in such high demand is throwing money away.
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So far, this i not happening with hydrogen generation, not even in Germany, where energy prices are fluctuating even more.
For electrolysis, construction costs of the plants are too high. It is not economical to build a plant that will not be running most of the time, even if it runs on very cheap or even free electricity when it is running.
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Not really. That's only in a few places (like Cali) and electricity prices there are still insanely high. It's quite obvious that there isn't a true power glut on the grid.
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Strangely, most of the people up-thread complain the largest portion of their electricity costs are due to air conditioning.
It is the same all over the place, even including locations in the developed world where traditionally air conditioning has been regarded as extravagance.
One wonders why has this become such a large outlay in the recent decade.
It is almost as if temperatures have been rising, necessitating air conditioning where it was not needed before, and all the costs associated with it.
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Even here in The Netherlands we starting to need heat pumps. Especially with good isolated houses.
The isolation keeps the heat out fine, but eventually it will radiate inwards if the heat wave stays for long enough.
And then the only way to get it out again is with heat pumps.
On the other hand we use the heat pumps to heat in fall/winter. Way more efficient then gas burners.
And in summer the AC at least lowers the amount of power my panels drop on the grid :p
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That's probably true in some markets, but maybe not so much in Florida.
Thank You, Fake AI (Score:3, Insightful)
Tax the poor so the rich can play more.
I think I'm gonna hurl.
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Thank Trump.
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And helping the American West into a prolonged drought that will screw the poor people even more. The thinking of Republicans is that if you tax something, you get less of it. So if they tax the poor more, there will be less poor. They aren't particularly bright but they are logical.
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It's not really a tax, it's more like how Dollar Tree realized that some of their customers were people showing up in Teslas looking for a bargain, so they jacked up their prices. Now when I go there trying to save money on hand soap or some shit, it's like $7. It's the Ferengi rules of acquisition, basically.
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I get a kick out of seeing nice cars parked at Aldi. Most expensive so far was a Mercedes S63.
Re: Thank You, Fake AI (Score:2)
I think it's just that some people are insecure. If you recall, that was the same day you brought all twenty of your iphones and all eight of your ipads.
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Why would I pay $6.99/lb at one of the 'upscale grocers' in town for spareribs when I can get them at Aldi for $1.49? I, too, drive a Mercedes, but it doesn't mean I'm a fucking moron w/my money.
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I walk to the upscale butchers, since I don't own a car. Meat had more attributes than simply cheapness.
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My post wasn't really fair: the "since" was misplaced. One is not a consequence of the other. I still walk.
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Sure, some well off people are well off, because they don't throw money away when they can chose not to.
Re: Thank You, Fake AI (Score:2, Insightful)
Compared to bulk pricing, dollar stores are a scam. Buy one sponge for $1 plus tax when a case of 12 sells for $6? Iâ(TM)ll pass.
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Maybe you only need one sponge?
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> Maybe you only need one sponge?
And you know you'll never, ever need another.
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Remind me to never use the dishes at your house when you invite me over.
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You're not invited so this isn't a problem for me.
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On the subject of sponges, people pay ridiculous amounts for name brand Magic Erasers while generic melamine sponges are crazy cheap online. I think I got 100 for about $15. Will last me for years.
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Possible, and no doubt the brand name will be a more consistent experience than any of the dozens of Chinese companies making them, which may vary frequently and for entirely random reasons. Definitely still diminishing returns in the value department though IMO.
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It would be ironic if that were one of the few Chinese products you could buy that DIDN'T have [1]melamine in it [fpa.org].
[1] https://fpa.org/the-return-of-melamine-and-chinese-product-safety-woes/
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Rest assured the potential irony was not lost on me.
Isn't the point of Dollar tree (Score:2)
That you can buy a tiny amount of some sort of necessity like toothpaste or toilet paper for a jacked up price per unit when you're too broke to go to a regular grocery store or a warehouse like Costco or Sam's club?
It wasn't the Tesla owners they were after at least it didn't used to be. It was paycheck to paycheck people that were forced to spend a dollar on a tube of toothpaste that was five times the price per ounce you'd pay in a regular grocery store.
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My experience with dollar store basic goods is that for some reason even the name brand products seem to be inferior performing in some way to the ones in regular stores. I'm pretty sure they are not counterfeits, but have long suspected they may be a sort of sellable factory seconds. Like binning with chips in a more familiar term for nerds.
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> That you can buy a tiny amount of some sort of necessity like toothpaste or toilet paper for a jacked up price per unit when you're too broke to go to a regular grocery store or a warehouse like Costco or Sam's club?
Yeah, that's part of what they do - selling tiny packages of brands you recognize where you end up actually paying more for less. They also carry generics and closeout/overstock merchandise that sometimes could be a genuinely good deal, along with a bunch of super cheap made-in-China crap that might be fine for when cheap made-in-China crap happens to be good enough.
Thing is, they ditched the "everything's $1.25" business model once they realized that it wasn't just poor folks who were shopping there, so n
Re: Thank You, Fake AI (Score:2)
Why not throw the poor into furnaces to power AI?
What if there's actually no real scarcity, just one created by administrators using the scarcity assumption of Econ 101 cynically as an excuse to get people to excuse administered price increases (i.e. not based primarily on supply and demand of physical resources)?
For example, will a cursory internet search reveal data from numerous non-AI sources showing natural gas prices have fallen precipitously back to pre-pandemic levels? So why is the story being sold
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Naaah, the rich need poor people to make them feel superior.
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> Why not throw the poor into furnaces to power AI?
Because killing them slowly makes even more money for the "health industry".
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> What if there's actually no real scarcity, just one created by administrators using the scarcity assumption of Econ 101 cynically as an excuse to get people to excuse administered price increases (i.e. not based primarily on supply and demand of physical resources)?
Could be, but I'm not sure how you define "scarcity" in the context of things like Bitcoin mining, which is literally a contest to see who can burn the most electricity in a given period of time in return for money. In that sort of competitive scenario, no amount of electricity will ever be enough, because adding more generation will simply up the power requirements to mine the next bitcoin; hence electricity is always scarce no matter how much is generated.
AI isn't quite as bad as that (since presumably t
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> I'm not sure how you define "scarcity" in the context of things like Bitcoin mining, which is literally a contest to see who can burn the most electricity in a given period of time in return for money. In that sort of competitive scenario, no amount of electricity will ever be enough, because adding more generation will simply up the power requirements to mine the next bitcoin; hence electricity is always scarce no matter how much is generated.
Very well said. Can't mod you up cause I've already posted.
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> Why not throw the poor into furnaces to power AI?
That's a low-skilled job, thus it would be the poor throwing themselves (or coworkers) into the furnace.
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Yay, let's welcome the retarded proposal to help "the poor" with a regressive income tax disguised as something else.
Excellent idea, and very novel, too.
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That's cool and all, but not really related to natgas prices or utility prices.