For the past five years, tech companies have been on an increasingly frenzied shopping spree for renewable contracts known as power purchase agreements (PPAs), which can enable data center operators to reserve power from a wind farm or solar site before the projects have even been built. In Denmark, there are solar farms paid for by Meta. In Norway, there are wind farms bankrolled by Google. As early adopters of these types of deals, tech companies have helped fuel Europe’s now-thriving PPA market, says Christoph Zipf, spokesperson at WindEurope. This month, Microsoft struck the world’s biggest renewables energy deal, signing a $10 billion contract for clean power across Europe and the US.
Yet renewables still need to run through the electricity grid, which is becoming a bottleneck—especially in Europe, as a surge of renewable producers try to connect to feed green transition demand across a multitude of sectors. “We’re going to run into energy constraints,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted on a podcast in April. At Davos this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also warned that the status quo was not going to be able to provide AI with the power it needed to advance. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said at a Bloomberg event.
This is why you will see more and more articles about YOU needing to cut back and pittance rebates being given to entirlce you to use less, and less. It’s YOUR fault the grid is failing to meet the demands of these companies who pay way less per kw then you ever will.
Then when things have settled somewhat, they will jack the price up per kw for YOU because you didn’t spend enough so they will need to recoup what YOU conserved by.
Seen it happen before with water where I’m from. They demanded we use less, gave brenates, then realized they lost money and jacked the costs up higher and removed the rebates.
If they charged these companies properly, they could expand the grid…but no, blame you so you use less then hike it up to charge you more. Watch.
I know for sure you’re correct, so I’m not going to argue with you. There are personal wind and solar farms for your home that seem to be coming down in price, just a thought.