Not to the general public. Your neighbor very likely cannot just go to a website and look up your title and current salary, like I can for the guy who lives down the block who currently works for the city I live in.
The same way callable bonds command a higher interest rate than non-callable do. If the bond holder can just decide that tomorrow it’s cheaper for them to pay off the bond vs pay me the coupon on it, it’s worth less to me as a buyer. I lose if interest rates go lower (bond is paid early) or higher (I am now holding a bond worth less than a newly issued one).
If you look through the bond market you will sometimes see bonds issued by the same company or agency both as callable and non-callable, the callable bonds are usually .5-1% lower even when issued on the same date.
For a 100MW scale facility the contract work is never over. Once you are done with one bit of work something else is in need of refreshing or changing. Components are breaking daily at that scale, and switch gear, UPS, generators, breakers, etc. all have useful lifetimes and a replacement cycle.
It’s effectively a full time job for an electrician crew or three.
Of course once the facility goes away entirely the job does too. But so goes a factory or anything else.
If a facility is somehow getting subsidized by the rest of the ratepayers then it’s a pricing problem that needs fixing.
The issue is that we collectively decided to stop investing in energy infrastructure for 50 years or so, and now all that capital investment needs to happen at once. You can’t even build a transmission line in a reasonable timeframe due to the insane NIMBY veto we have given everyone.
Typically industrial consumers of electricity with predictable 24x7 demand are a good thing for an electric grid. They actually subsidize the rest, and that’s reflected in the lower cost per watt they tend to pay the utility.
If the entire interconnection is simply out of generation capacity that’s a much larger failure further upstream by regulators and voters who wanted their cake and to eat it too for many years. It’s coming for us either way if we want to remain a viable competitive economy on the world stage. You can only maximize financialization for so long until you need to start actually making stuff again.
Yes, a portion of power is metered costs. Often times (though I am not certain about this case), there are fixed costs that everyone pays a chunk of. If these sorts of projects aren't handled well, the fixed cost that a massive data-center pays may be disproportionate to he cost they incur on the system.
Not building energy production and distribution for the past 50 years is what is causing electricity prices to increase. Chickens coming home to roost. Eventually you run out of the previous generation’s infrastructure investments and cheap tricks like efficiency gains to avoid real capital investment.
Datacenter demand has simply brought demand forward a bit. This was always coming for us.
So long as they are paying market rates like any other power consumer of their size I see zero problem with it. If they are getting sweetheart deals and exemptions from regulatory rates then there would be a problem.
The issue is lack of building stuff that needed to happen 20-30 years ago when it began to be an obvious critical need. De-industrialization just masked the problem.
If we can’t figure out as a society how to come out ahead with a much more robust electric grid after this giant investment bubble we have utterly failed at a generational scale.
Yeah, I rented a Corolla recently which was about as basic as it got - and within less than 90 seconds of entering the vehicle/driving I had everything I needed figured out.
CarPlay was trivial to pair up. Screen resolution was meh, but otherwise it Just Worked(tm).
Adaptive cruise was trivial to turn on and read the indicators for.
Lane keep assist was also overtly obvious - both if it was on, and how to turn it on/off.
The A/C controls were nice easily understood knobs and buttons.
GMO free is anti-scientific. At least a ton of overlap between those who pursue it and also have a whole lot of other woo-woo food related eccentricities. A rounding error of people against it when you talk to them will bring up "big ag" monopolies/etc. which are legitimate concerns vs. various vague health concerns from eating it.
Organic I suppose is borderline. My parents were in this space as farmers, and the commercial scale operations putting the "certified organic" labels on mass produced food would be largely indistinguishable from the farm or large ag business next door. It devolved into a near-meaningless label to me seeing how it's been completely gamed to the point of being meaningless.
I put all this stuff - including the fad diets - somewhere on the "started from a kernel of truth and descended into crazy" spectrum.
Timely. I’m about to turn off severe weather alerts from my local city because they insist on spamming - multiple times per day - cold weather alerts.
And they start at pretty ridiculous temperatures in the double digits. The only way those would be dangerous to you is if you were homeless and lacked any form of winter clothing, at which point you either already know or are too far mentally gone for a text alert to help you.
Love these! My wife gifted me a Chicago CTA map for a birthday gift a few years ago and it makes great wall art.
I found an in-box rated USB-C hardwired power adapter, and ran an additional outlet above an existing one. Then used a couple screwed together brass motherboard standoffs I drilled holes into the drywall for. To my surprise just some standard superglue in the holes have held these far more securely than needed.
Looks like a great piece of “90s retro art” and gets a lot comments from guest!
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