reuters.com
www.reuters.com

America’s largest power grid is under strain as data centers and AI chatbots consume power faster than new plants can be built.

Electricity bills are projected to surge by more than 20% this summer in some parts of PJM Interconnection’s territory, which covers 13 states - from Illinois to Tennessee, Virginia to New Jersey - serving 67 million customers in a region with the most data centers in the world.

The upheaval at PJM started a year ago with a more than 800% jump in prices at its annual capacity auction. Rising prices out of the auction trickle down to everyday people’s power bills.

For context: In 2019, I was paying $0.09/KWh and today I pay about $0.29/KWh with yet another rate hike looming.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    In this one, it’s all in the inverter. You just plug it into an outlet, and it can do up to 1000W (though 950 was the most I’ve ever gotten from 1.2 KW of PV coming in at ~90 volts).

    You can have multiple inverters; they match the frequency and voltage of the incoming utility power and won’t output anything if there’s no utility power coming in (anti-islanding protection).

    The only thing to be aware of is not over loading a circuit where you have them connected. I do have a dedicated circuit/outlet for that.

    They’re useless if the power’s out, but I’m looking into something of a transfer switch to redirect the PV output from the grid-tie inverter to a regular one, but I haven’t gone too far down that path yet.

    Edit: It’s the same principle that’s used in balcony solar