Electricity Prices Are Climbing More Than Twice as Fast as Inflation (npr.org) 238
Electricity prices have increased at more than double the inflation rate over the past year, according to NPR reporting. Florida Power & Light customers face monthly bills exceeding $400 during summer months, prompting the utility to seek a 13% rate increase over four years that drew tens of thousands of petition signatures in opposition.
The Energy Department projects data centers will consume more electricity than residential customers for the first time in 2026. Natural gas costs for power generation rose 40% in the first half of 2025 compared to 2024, and the department expects another 17% increase next year. Natural gas generates more than 40% of U.S. electricity. One in six households currently struggles to pay electric bills. The federal government provides $4 billion annually in energy assistance for low-income families.
Further reading: Big Tech's AI Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone.
The Energy Department projects data centers will consume more electricity than residential customers for the first time in 2026. Natural gas costs for power generation rose 40% in the first half of 2025 compared to 2024, and the department expects another 17% increase next year. Natural gas generates more than 40% of U.S. electricity. One in six households currently struggles to pay electric bills. The federal government provides $4 billion annually in energy assistance for low-income families.
Further reading: Big Tech's AI Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone.
Thank You, Fake AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Tax the poor so the rich can play more.
I think I'm gonna hurl.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not really a tax, it's more like how Dollar Tree realized that some of their customers were people showing up in Teslas looking for a bargain, so they jacked up their prices. Now when I go there trying to save money on hand soap or some shit, it's like $7. It's the Ferengi rules of acquisition, basically.
Re: Thank You, Fake AI (Score:2, Insightful)
Compared to bulk pricing, dollar stores are a scam. Buy one sponge for $1 plus tax when a case of 12 sells for $6? Iâ(TM)ll pass.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe you only need one sponge?
And you know you'll never, ever need another.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It would be ironic if that were one of the few Chinese products you could buy that DIDN'T have melamine in it [fpa.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Isn't the point of Dollar tree (Score:2)
It wasn't the Tesla owners they were after at least it didn't used to be. It was paycheck to paycheck people that were forced to spend a dollar on a tube of toothpaste that was five times the price per ounce you'd pay in a regular grocery store.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
My experience with dollar store basic goods is that for some reason even the name brand products seem to be inferior performing in some way to the ones in regular stores. I'm pretty sure they are not counterfeits, but have long suspected they may be a sort of sellable factory seconds. Like binning with chips in a more familiar term for nerds.
I spoke with a distributer who said a lot of stuff they sell to those types of stores are perishables near the sell by date. They at leat get something fo rit rather than destroy it.
Re: (Score:2)
That you can buy a tiny amount of some sort of necessity like toothpaste or toilet paper for a jacked up price per unit when you're too broke to go to a regular grocery store or a warehouse like Costco or Sam's club?
Yeah, that's part of what they do - selling tiny packages of brands you recognize where you end up actually paying more for less. They also carry generics and closeout/overstock merchandise that sometimes could be a genuinely good deal, along with a bunch of super cheap made-in-China crap that might be fine for when cheap made-in-China crap happens to be good enough.
Thing is, they ditched the "everything's $1.25" business model once they realized that it wasn't just poor folks who were shopping there, so n
Re: Thank You, Fake AI (Score:2)
I think it's just that some people are insecure. If you recall, that was the same day you brought all twenty of your iphones and all eight of your ipads.
Re:Thank You, Fake AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would I pay $6.99/lb at one of the 'upscale grocers' in town for spareribs when I can get them at Aldi for $1.49? I, too, drive a Mercedes, but it doesn't mean I'm a fucking moron w/my money.
Re: (Score:2)
I walk to the upscale butchers, since I don't own a car. Meat had more attributes than simply cheapness.
Re: Thank You, Fake AI (Score:5, Funny)
Awesome, virtue signal received. +1 for that additional touch of snobbery.
Re: (Score:3)
Awesome, virtue signal received. +1 for that additional touch of snobbery.
You think meat is a fungible commodity? That's not how anything works.
Re: (Score:3)
Awesome, virtue signal received.
Interesting! You believe there is something virtuous about one or more of not owning a car, walking, shopping locally or buying quality. And yet you're angry about that.
If you think it's good, do it yourself, but if you don't then stop caring so hard about what other people do.
Re: (Score:2)
My post wasn't really fair: the "since" was misplaced. One is not a consequence of the other. I still walk.
Re:Thank You, Fake AI (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would I pay $6.99/lb at one of the 'upscale grocers' in town for spareribs when I can get them at Aldi for $1.49? I, too, drive a Mercedes, but it doesn't mean I'm a fucking moron w/my money.
This seems to be an affectation of the faux rich. The kind of people who have to project that they have a better life than others but really are no richer. Have to have a bigger, more valuable house, have to have a bigger and more expensive Mercedes than you (I too have a merc, it's a 2007 SLK that I bought for £3,000, I didn't buy it to impress anyone but me). "Sainsbury's Dhaaaaling, you peasant, we only shop at Waitrose". The kind of people who've never had real money, many probably grew up poor and would have stayed that way had society in it's entirety not been booted upwards. They just don't know the value of a dollar/pound/euro so it ends up slipping through their fingers. You won't be surprised to find that most of their life is on credit and mortgaged up to the eyeballs.
Oddly enough, the rich people I know are often the tightest and definitely not the flashiest. They'll repair that old jacket, drive an old Subaru (which is why it's hard to get a good Subi Forrester in the UK, the toffs have them all) so on and so forth.
I don't necessarily shop at the cheapest shop, my big problem with ALDI is that I can never seem to find what I'm after (yeah, I am a bit fussy) as much as I like perusing the Aisle of Dreams (2 man tent and chainsaws woo hoo) but that's besides the point, I demand value for money. I'm quite willing to spend extra if I can see value in it. The Vimes Boots theory, a $10 pair of boots that will barely last 2 or 3 seasons is poorer value than a $50 pair that will last 5 years. Vimes' theory is that people in poverty can only afford to buy the $10 boots and the rich could end up saving money because they could afford to buy the $50 pair.
That being said, I like to support local businesses where I can even if it's a little more expensive. That money largely stays in the community rather than going to head office or offshore.
Re: Thank You, Fake AI (Score:2)
Why not throw the poor into furnaces to power AI?
What if there's actually no real scarcity, just one created by administrators using the scarcity assumption of Econ 101 cynically as an excuse to get people to excuse administered price increases (i.e. not based primarily on supply and demand of physical resources)?
For example, will a cursory internet search reveal data from numerous non-AI sources showing natural gas prices have fallen precipitously back to pre-pandemic levels? So why is the story being sold
Re: Thank You, Fake AI (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not throw the poor into furnaces to power AI?
Because killing them slowly makes even more money for the "health industry".
Re: Thank You, Fake AI (Score:5, Interesting)
What if there's actually no real scarcity, just one created by administrators using the scarcity assumption of Econ 101 cynically as an excuse to get people to excuse administered price increases (i.e. not based primarily on supply and demand of physical resources)?
Could be, but I'm not sure how you define "scarcity" in the context of things like Bitcoin mining, which is literally a contest to see who can burn the most electricity in a given period of time in return for money. In that sort of competitive scenario, no amount of electricity will ever be enough, because adding more generation will simply up the power requirements to mine the next bitcoin; hence electricity is always scarce no matter how much is generated.
AI isn't quite as bad as that (since presumably they will someday reach a point where AIs are "smart enough" and they no longer feel the need to scale them up any further), but at the moment it's rather similar -- a contest between OpenAI and Anthropic to see who can run the most GPUs at once, in the hope that something useful will come out of it.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure how you define "scarcity" in the context of things like Bitcoin mining, which is literally a contest to see who can burn the most electricity in a given period of time in return for money. In that sort of competitive scenario, no amount of electricity will ever be enough, because adding more generation will simply up the power requirements to mine the next bitcoin; hence electricity is always scarce no matter how much is generated.
Very well said. Can't mod you up cause I've already posted.
Re: (Score:2)
If anyone wants to see the first comment in this thread that actually addresses the topic, go to https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
It may be a record for the longest string of irrelevant comments, all desperately trying to evade the issue.
Re: (Score:2)
Yay, let's welcome the retarded proposal to help "the poor" with a regressive income tax disguised as something else.
Excellent idea, and very novel, too.
Re: (Score:2)
That's cool and all, but not really related to natgas prices or utility prices.
Re: (Score:2)
That's cool and all, but not really related to natgas prices or utility prices.
I'm so familiar with the FairTax that I forget that most are not. Yes, it is on topic because instituting the FairTax would cause the prices of natural gas, and everything else "made in America", to fall. There are myriad instances of income tax of all sorts adding to the cost of production of everything "made in America", including natural gas, that would simply go away when the income taxes are abolished by the same bill that would institute the FairTax. So prices would go down at the same time that
Re:Thank You, GEOTUS Trump! (Score:4, Insightful)
And helping the American West into a prolonged drought that will screw the poor people even more. The thinking of Republicans is that if you tax something, you get less of it. So if they tax the poor more, there will be less poor. They aren't particularly bright but they are logical.
trump take electricity (Score:5, Funny)
“Under my administration, we will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months”
he's still got a year folks, lets just relax and bask in the greatness
Re:trump take electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
Still waiting on my grocery prices as promised on “day one” https://thehill.com/homenews/n... [thehill.com]
Re:trump take electricity (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
About them trade deals, there aren't really any. They are mostly just vague promises that he can honk on about. Europe's pols will tell you they cannot tell their companies to invest $500 Billion in the U.S. or to buy $250 Billion in carbon. A similar story with Japan, la Presidenta's $550 Billion from Japan is merely loans guarantees and they expect an equal share of any profits.....which won't happen because no one is stupid enough to loan la Presidenta money after what he did to the banks who were stupid
Re: (Score:3)
You know how to tell when a Trump is lying?.... Oh you already know the punch line.
Karoline Leavitt is having an aneurism on camera and calling it a press conference?
but isn't capitalism the most efficent system? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost like giving private, for-profit corporations monopoly ownership of essential services is a bad thing...
Re: (Score:3)
Interestingly, Texas has an actual marketplace for retail electricity. Every electricity customer can pick from dozens of different retail electricity providers. As a result, there are many options like guaranteed fixed-rate plans, green plans, as well as gimmicky plans like free nights and weekends, or plans with rebates if you stay under a certain usage amount.
While it's not a truly capitalist market (the wholesale market is still a regional monopoly), the result has been lower prices. In Houston, for exa
Re: (Score:3)
While it's not a truly capitalist market (the wholesale market is still a regional monopoly), the result has been lower prices. In Houston, for example, we're able to get fixed-rate plans at 12 cents per kWh.
And you think 12c/kWh is a good deal? I just pulled Ohio's rates on Energy Choice Ohio, I can lock a 12 month fixed contract today at 8.29c/kWh, no ETF, no montly fee. If you're a heavy user, 6.69c/kWh with a $14.95 fee - in case you're not a mathemetician, break-even is 935 kWh/month average usage.
Re: (Score:3)
Texas isn't the cheapest market, but it's on the low end. https://www.electricchoice.com... [electricchoice.com].
Based on the linked chart, it's the 12th cheapest and 3 cents less than the US average.
On this ranking, Ohio is in the middle of the pack, on average 1 cent more than Texas. I can't explain your low quoted rates, I suspect the devil is in the details.
Re: but isn't capitalism the most efficent system? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: but isn't capitalism the most efficent system? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There's no need for a "government-granted monopoly" - all "free market" systems, that is, exchanges where there are no enforceable external rules, naturally degrade into some sort of oligopoly or monopoly. It is an economic effect you simply cannot escape.
Is this also "Socialism"?
Re: (Score:3)
You always treat your own speculation and oversimplification as fact, and then wonder why you always come out of it looking like a moron. Whether you end up with an oligopoly or even a monopoly really depends on both the industry and the market, and neither of these is inherently bad, either. It really depends on many things. Breaking up a natural monopoly, such as a utility provider, doesn't make any sense as all it will do is result in a less efficient means of production. As jumbo jets have become more a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Whether you end up with an oligopoly or even a monopoly really depends on both the industry and the market
No, it doesn't. Invariably and in any market that doesn't have external regulation, a.k.a. "free market", the competition is severely reduced in the long run, creating a non-optimal economic outcome. There is so much evidence of that that only a complete moron will even try to dispute it.
Which isn't stopping you, obviously.
Breaking up a natural monopoly, such as a utility provider, doesn't make any sense as all it will do is result in a less efficient means of production.
Quite the contrary, a natural monopoly naturally creates a non-optimal economic outcome, which must be corrected to achieve economic efficiency. Typically this happens by reallocating the
Re: (Score:2)
by ensuring effective regulation, of course.
Re:but isn't capitalism the most efficent system? (Score:4, Informative)
Capitalism [merriam-webster.com]: "an economic system in which resources and means of production are privately owned and prices, production, and the distribution of goods are determined mainly by competition in a free market." In general, with capitalism, resources are distributed based on the value (to the other party) of the goods being exchanged. Thus, transactions normally occur where both participants end up better off.
Socialism: "a system or condition of society in which the means of production are controlled by the state (government)." In general, with socialism, resources are (by law) supposed to be distributed based on fairness and equality. In practice, resources are distributed by personal relationships (aka "who you know").
As to a monopolies:
In capitalism, a natural monopoly is considered a flaw to corrected, hopefully by a new competitor or a substitute product.
In Socialism, monopolies are created by law, in an effort to distribute their products to as many citizens as practical / possible.
"In 1907, the New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC)-the first such state regulatory body in the nation - was formed to regulate the new business of electric utilities. In exchange for the right to hold a monopoly in a service territory, the utility's price would be regulated and the utility would agree to serve all customers in that territory." NYPSC [ny.gov]. Other states followed New York's example, but the concept didn't work. Power companies avoided serving low-profit sub-urban and rural areas, eventually resulting in the Federal Rural Electrification Act [wikipedia.org]. Worse, the power companies were attempting to expand their monopolies to other energy sources (such as propane and fuel oil). So the Federal government passed another law, Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
I like my electricity co-op. I've been paying 8c/KWH for a decade and it still isn't going up
I'm paying 9. I positively shudder when I hear of people paying in the 30s, and sadly they seem to exist. A lot.
Cheap reliable electricity should not be a luxury good in a first world society. It should be a basic necessity like water. Oh yeah, I guess I should not really go there either.
Re: (Score:2)
On the other hand: power failures are very very rare here.
Last time the power failed here was because someone with a digger hit the neighborhood mainline. (cables are buried here)
The grid-maintainer had it fixed in like 2 hours.
Duck! (Score:3, Insightful)
AI smells, waddles, quacks, swims, and farts like a bubble.
It will likely follow a similar pattern to the dot-com crash of 2000: a lot of interesting ideas are floated and tried, but the existing players don't know how to make it profitable and investors will eventually figure that out, triggering a crash. The AI server farm build craze will then freeze for roughly a decade, making power demand flat again.
Gradually better entrepreneurs and/or trial and error will figure out how to make money on AI and it will normalize in baby steps.
Don't get me wrong, AI can do interesting things, but it's being subsidized by irrationally exuberant investors full of tax cuts for the rich.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but the problem with bubbles is they continue until there's free money to dump into them. Remember the decade-long Greenspan "quant ease"?
The current policy is to put another boatload or two into this crap, from the lavish government expenditures to "boost" the technology, to the tax reduction windfall, which needs to be invested somewhere.
There's no guarantee at all that the bubble will burst and restart the market in a more efficient manner anytime soon, or without a major recession in-between.
Re: (Score:2)
Every now and again, Group A finds a new recipe to con (the very much larger) Group B out of their life savings.
That's the American way. Nothing to see here...
My bad (Score:2)
This is probably my fault. It's just my luck that after I owned an EV gas prices would stay relatively flat, but electricity would go through the roof.
In all seriousness though, at least here in Florida the bulk of my power usage goes towards air conditioning. At the roughly 4 miles per kWh that the Bolt gets, if the entirety of my monthly electic bill went towards car charging, that'd be enough to drive 9,840 miles. Air conditioning truly is a massive power suck.
Re: (Score:2)
The silver lining (I guess) is that the more grid prices rise, the more incentive people will have to install solar panels at home to avoid paying grid prices as much as possible.
Re: (Score:2)
Unprofitable (Score:5, Insightful)
A reminder that LLM-hawking companies are deeply, comically unprofitable right now. They're giant pits where money goes to be redistributed to NVidia and power companies, as well as huge signing bonuses for individual programmers.
Do not base your workflow or any part of your organization on anything that assumes that LLMs will be there, even on a free tier. If you can't build or maintain it yourself, it's a liability. At these rates, SOMEONE will have to pull back at some point, there's just no choice.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a silly take. Same could have been said about Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and many others at one point. Most startups don't make money right out the door. But believing they'll never do so is just stupid.
I don't think his take was that AI startups will all fail; rather it was that AI (as currently implemented) costs a lot of money to run, and that cost is currently being paid by investors rather than by customers.
But the investors won't be willing to subsidize cheap/free AI forever, so at some point the cost of these AI services will rise to somewhere higher than the cost of the electricity and hardware it takes to provide them, and it would be wise to take that into account rather than assuming that today'
Re: (Score:2)
Certainly most won't make it but the big AI companies, the ones using a lot of power and the ones being talked about, the ones people are using in their company workflows, they'll survive. OpenAI, Anthropic and others will most certainly be very profitable in the future.
A.I. and intermittent sources are driving costs! (Score:2, Troll)
Demand from A.I. companies is significant. Also renewables are intermittent. So they are paired with peaking methane which is extremely expensive and dirty. Having to rely on peaking electricity every single night drives up electricity costs significantly.
If we want to lower pollution and costs we need to build new nuclear energy. Yes, nuclear. The high upfront cost of a nuclear power plant is more than made up for in the long run with low operation costs, low fuel costs, and an extremely long life
Re: (Score:2)
Agree about AI. But I don't quite follow your argument about renewables. Even without them you'd still have natural gas base load power. That's certainly cleaner than coal, and it's quite cost effective. If you were referring to CO2 emissions, yes natural gas has that, but less than coal. Not sure why you tie natural gas to renewables (although they do make a good, reasonably clean pair).
Nuclear fission is the most expensive option on the table. The cost to build plants are crazy high. Extracting urani
Re: (Score:2)
I see. I'm totally okay with solar being paired with natural gas in the short term. The reason being that the storage issue is a solvable one. And there's a definite path forward with real public support. Investing in solar energy production and storage is a no brainer, at least for most folk. We'd be stupid to not put up more solar. Nuclear isn't so clear cut. I agree we need more nuclear. Maybe when a Democrat king gets elected he can executive order his way to building nuclear power plants. Until
Math doesn't add up (Score:4, Informative)
So, "Electricity prices have increased at more than double the inflation rate over the past year". That is probably true for some utilities. However, the specific example [fpl.com] in Florida shows increases of 13.3% for one region and 5.8% for the other region over 4 years. There are various nationwide inflation metrics, but let's say the current rate is 2.7%. Over four years, that would be a price increase of 11.2%. So, for that specific Florida utility, one region would see electricity rates rise slightly over general inflation, while the other region would see an increase quite a bit below the inflation rate.
It may be true that electricity inflation is far outpacing general inflation, but the Florida example is a poor example.
Re: (Score:2)
Data Centers (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks data centers and AI centers for vacuuming up all of the energy we were supposed to be saving with more efficient appliances and LED lighting.
Yes, and quite a bit more than that. (Score:2)
The power company in my very red state has half a dozen rate increases they're trying to push - meanwhile Google is trying to build data centers here. They already have problems keeping the fucking lights on because of all the intense climate change weather (storms/heat/etc.) much more than they did even 5 years ago.
Earthship design = cost free cooling! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That works well when cooling a small house, but fails spectacularly at even commercial scale to say nothing of industrial scale which is driving the majority of the electricity cost.
Re: (Score:2)
That works well when cooling a small house, but fails spectacularly at even commercial scale to say nothing of industrial scale which is driving the majority of the electricity cost.
This is more interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Does that really work in places like Florida?
Doing it wrong (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A modest proposal (Score:2)
Well, we know AI is going to put a lot of people out of work. So how about we hire some of those people to donate their body heat to generate electricity for the machines? They'd check into a big building and go into little relaxation pods that collect their heat.
We'll give them VR headsets to keep them amused. Eventually, the technology will be so good we'll be able to plug directly into their brains and they'll think they're out and about doing something while their body heat is powering the machines
Re: (Score:2)
With all due respect to you and your agent friends, there are more economical ways to generate power :)
Electricity prices up, thank data centers... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well look at it this way, your taxes mostly go towards keeping someone else from taking the rest of what you've earned. Whether the potential taker could be some other country or another American who feels like they drew the short straw in life.
Re: (Score:2)
That's what the Sicilian gentlemen with the double-breasted suits and no necks said, but they were taking a somewhat smaller cut.
Re: (Score:2)
Why don’t you move to a country without taxes? There are a few.
Re: (Score:2)
Because that would be a long commute for my child's school.
Re: (Score:2)
[Why not move to a country without taxes]Because that would be a long commute for my child's school.
Just move your kid to a local school - problem solved!
What, you say there are no good schools, because nobody pays taxes? And the only schools are private and too expensive? Geeze, I wonder how this happened!
Re: (Score:2)
I send my kid to a private school.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, I really don't think so.
My kid is a lot more likely to be shot in my neighborhood than at school.
Re: (Score:2)
Good god, no. I'd never mistreat my child that way.
Local school district spends about $22K/year/student, which is about $8K/year more than our private school, and it gets absolutely miserable test scores and ratings.
I'd home school before sending him to the local public schools.
Re: (Score:2)
People are way too concerned about what they pay "private corporations" to care much about what they're paying to the government.
Not sure why this is modded troll. I'd mod you up but I've already posted.
It is unpopular to point out to people government is not your friend. They are a necessary evil with a tendency to metastasis.
Re: (Score:2)
And he could also be kicking his tax dodging mates asses so some of them start sharing the burden.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't eat avocados.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah. Living large on my $81K/year. Lookout top ten richest Americans list, I'm comin for ya!!
Re: (Score:3)
math doesnt add up
you are probably paying 7-10k in takes total
your mortgage for 365 should probably be around 2k at least with 20% down.
Re: (Score:2)
Strangely, most of the people up-thread complain the largest portion of their electricity costs are due to air conditioning.
It is the same all over the place, even including locations in the developed world where traditionally air conditioning has been regarded as extravagance.
One wonders why has this become such a large outlay in the recent decade.
It is almost as if temperatures have been rising, necessitating air conditioning where it was not needed before, and all the costs associated with it.
Re: (Score:2)
The isolation keeps the heat out fine, but eventually it will radiate inwards if the heat wave stays for long enough.
And then the only way to get it out again is with heat pumps.
On the other hand we use the heat pumps to heat in fall/winter. Way more efficient then gas burners.
And in summer the AC at least lowers the amount of power my panels drop on the grid
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I had to install one in my place in the Hague this summer.
Re: (Score:2)
That's probably true in some markets, but maybe not so much in Florida.
Re: (Score:2)
That's very funny, because they are curtailing the alternatives because they generate too much electricity!
Sooner or later some bright individual will realize that instead of dumping that excess electricity, they could be using it to mine Bitcoins, or electrolyze hydrogen out of seawater, or (insert your favorite low-priority process here).
Curtailing electricity generation in an era where electricity is in such high demand is throwing money away.
Re: (Score:2)
So far, this i not happening with hydrogen generation, not even in Germany, where energy prices are fluctuating even more.
For electrolysis, construction costs of the plants are too high. It is not economical to build a plant that will not be running most of the time, even if it runs on very cheap or even free electricity when it is running.
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. That's only in a few places (like Cali) and electricity prices there are still insanely high. It's quite obvious that there isn't a true power glut on the grid.