The most expensive voter mistake.
Friends, hello!
Democrats have made data centers a major target in their campaign, with data centers suddenly appearing in almost all of their campaign speeches and rising electricity bills becoming a major argument against them. Only it turned out not to be true.
◽ Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard calculated: the share of the data centers built in 2020-2025 in the overall increase in electricity prices amounted to only 4% of the total increase in rates for the population during this period. The remaining 96% of the increase came from other sources.
Scapegoat - data centers.
The thesis worked perfectly. It's easy to imagine data centers consuming energy for neural networks as the reason for expensive electricity - 53% of Americans attribute the rate hike to them.
And that's a Republican failure: The study, which destroys the opponents' central argument, has been in the public domain since October 9, almost a month before the election. But they only started talking about him in detail on November 6, when the votes were counted.
The Democrats won, the market feared data center construction would slow, and the Nasdaq 100 lost $2.5 trillion in a day. The "donkeys" occupied both houses of Congress, and in Texas, Democrat Gina Hinojosa became governor for the first time since 1990, promising to stop the construction of new data centers. The main irony is that in Texas itself, rates rose only 5.9% over the year and remained 10.8% below the national average.
Who and what is actually raising the rates? Spoiler: old power grids, weather and Trump.
networks. It is not so much electricity that becomes more expensive, but its delivery to the house. Old lines and substations must be replaced, new ones built, and the costs of the energy company are included in the tariff. Over 20 years, costs have increased by 160%, almost three times for highways - and this is the main growth factor.
element. After hurricanes, networks are restored; In situations prone to fire, the lines are protected in advance and liability is insured. In California, the share of such costs in the rate increased from 1.7% to 17%.
oil.