Requiring $7 billion in collateral, nearly half the cost of the entire $15 billion project, to insure the utility’s full capital investment in case the company walks away, is completely insane. “Existing customers should not subsidize data centers” seems like pure demagogy there.
If the details in this article are correct, it’s because they need $7 billion dollars worth of power infrastructure built out for their 1GW datacenter, not an arbitrary punitive penalty.
You seem convinced it has to be demagogy but that’s a significant amount of concentrated risk for the utility on a single project that could evaporate and leave them holding the bag, forcing rate increases for existing ratepayers.
Local utility We Energies’ “very large customer” tariff requires any data centre developer with an S&P rating below single A minus to post collateral in the form of cash or a letter of credit. The size of the collateral is determined by the value of any power plants and transmission lines built to service the data centre.
I paid 9 thousand in taxes this year, does that give me the privilege to take out 80k in loans, no questions asked? That's pretty much what you're arguing.
And that's not even a fair comparison. My loan wouldn't go towards something that ultimately raises everyone else's energy bills and become a noise pollution factor.
