← Voice corpusEdition 2026-10-10, preview.
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President Trump asked the Hyperscalers to sign a Rate Payer Pledge a few months ago. It was a smart and good thing by all parties. That said, electricity prices will keep going up. Why? A Utility has a unique business model that incentivizes them to invest more, each year, to maintain existing capacity as well as build more capacity. Because their profit is capped as a percentage of what they invest each year. For illustrative purposes assume they have a 10% earnings cap on yearly CapEx. Their incentive is to now spend as much CapEx as possible each year. This way, they can apply their 10% to as large of a number as possible. This isn't dissimilar to what happened to healthcare costs post Obamacare when Obama capped the health insurance companies to a 15% margin. They rapidly walked underlying prices up...with no real tie back to quality. Bottom line, as it currently stands, if a utility can justify spending $10B vs $1B, they make more, so they will. We will then be asked to pay more. This is the vicious cycle we are in. One way to get out of it is to move to solar and storage for your home. You break free of this negative loop and become your own mini power utility. You make and use what you need, send the excess back to the grid and oftentimes can be paid to do so. The adoption of solar and storage directly tie to how broken electricity prices are. With no end in sight, the long term future will be a massively distributed energy ecosystem of homes that make their own power, data centers that make their own power, commercial and industrial that make their own power and utilities with far fewer customers than they have today.

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Monopolies will tell you we can’t have competition because we’d duplicate transmission and waste money… …and then they’ll spend 25x what it should cost. https://t.co/dYrPK3QNXB

JessePeltan ↗
Library as of 2026-10-24