NextEra’s blockbuster deal with Dominion likely means higher bills for consumers.
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Electrical utility megamerger is all about the data centers
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I do wonder if all this maneuvering is also part of an attempt to reach the "to big to fail" status, and eventually secure government buyout.
There is so much money involved in the AI nonsense and anything that orbits it, that is- personally speaking, haunting.
There is so much money involved in the AI nonsense and anything that orbits it, that is- personally speaking, haunting.
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Looking at the states in question, maybe they will learn something from the political entanglements that made this move possible.
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If that means the government takes command, breaks them up, and then, has a hand in converting them to local municipal control, absolutely yes. Go for it.
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Capitalists: "Competition is what drives better products, services, customer service, and lower prices! Isn't Capitalism great?!"
Also Capitalists: "What we need is less competition by allowing companies to merge into a megamonopoly or cartel of 3 giant corps that control the entire market."
Also Capitalists: "What we need is less competition by allowing companies to merge into a megamonopoly or cartel of 3 giant corps that control the entire market."
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It is almost like having investor-owned utilities was always a bad idea, because this is always the inevitable outcome.
Unfortunately--I don't think there's any chance of that happening in the USA. We are too deep in the Free Markets Are The Answer religion.
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We have played this game before. Anti monopoly laws exist for reasons. One could read about these things, I suppose.
Human history is rife with societies learning, unlearning, and then (maybe) relearning lessons.
Maga has assured that we are going to relearn this one good, and hard.
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Florida Power & Light (NextEra) is required by law to get competitive bids for any solar farm of 75 MW or larger. Almost all of their projects are 74.5 MW so they can build at whatever inflated price they want and collect the standard utility 10% return on capital with zero competition. Capitol spending with a guaranteed rate of return is where it's at for most utilities
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Luckily they're still mostly regulated in these markets. Unlike Texas and about 15 other states. Texas was one of the worst experiences I've ever had with electricity. The only thing deregulation created was redundant retail reseller middle men, reselling you the same electrons as everyone else but with different amounts of markup with different contractual BS, artificial market segmentation, and if you were really unlucky floating electric rates with no cap.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is a play toward consolidation and eventual deregulation of a huge chunk of the east coast.
I remember the shenanigans ERCOT pulled during the valentines day winter deep freeze of 2021. Now imagine it's not impending winter weather but a sudden increase in demand of AI compute and nearby rates skyrocket. At least weather can be forecasted. OpenAI spooling up a new product can't be forecasted in the same way.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is a play toward consolidation and eventual deregulation of a huge chunk of the east coast.
I remember the shenanigans ERCOT pulled during the valentines day winter deep freeze of 2021. Now imagine it's not impending winter weather but a sudden increase in demand of AI compute and nearby rates skyrocket. At least weather can be forecasted. OpenAI spooling up a new product can't be forecasted in the same way.
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If you own the roof over your home and it sees the sun, you should have installed solar panels and batteries by now. The rest of us are screwed 
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As a Dominion customer I have to admit I don't like Dominion at all, but as a future NextEra customer I'd hate it even more. I doubt regulators will do anything, even with the slightly more pro-citizen government in Virginia. Dominion owns the SCC, they always get what they want, and this will be no different.
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A somewhat famous Virginian and his solar adventures... He is also doing hydro on his pond.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N75TCAu5mY0
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N75TCAu5mY0
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I’d love to agree but the data center energy demand has hit Lake Tahoe the hardest, and is about to rampage in Florida. These are very wealthy communities getting hit in the nuts not fading rust belt towns.
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Go ahead. Merge. Let them become a giant monopoly. All the easier to nationalize the entire fucking system and restore the entire goddamned point of government.
The infrastructure of modern life should be owned and operated by the people. Not private, for-profit corporations.
The infrastructure of modern life should be owned and operated by the people. Not private, for-profit corporations.
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I worked as a vendor or consultant to utilities across North America for 20+ years in the areas of transmission, distribution and fiber.
Florida Power & Light (NextEra) was the best run of any I dealt with. I was glad to see them buy SCANA in South Carolina; SCANA never impressed me.
FPL won the Baldridge award for total quality management.
Florida Power & Light (NextEra) was the best run of any I dealt with. I was glad to see them buy SCANA in South Carolina; SCANA never impressed me.
FPL won the Baldridge award for total quality management.
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Data center demand only hit Lake Tahoe because it’s an extremist NIMBY regime that refuses to build their own infrastructure.
The Nevada company that decided to prioritize a Nevada data center instead of California residents did the right thing.
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Meanwhile, in a land down under...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/05...000-home-batteries-in-10-months-for-11-2-gwh/
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/05...000-home-batteries-in-10-months-for-11-2-gwh/
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popping the bubble will wipe out a bunch of companies. but it's not going to get rid of giant LLMs.
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That is a monumental "if", don't you think?
Take a look at the current administration ... the proverbial "snowball in hell" has more chances to become ice than this government do anything that does not facilitate mega donors and the orange Orangutan's family.
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I think Virginia will likely see the same carbon emissions regardless of who owns Dominion. Just meeting planned AI power demand will require an all-of-the-above generation mix. Renewables-only and/or more nuclear can’t be built fast enough. Natural gas turbine and diesel generators manufacturers have long backlogs. It’s to the point that one player is buying, removing and modifying jet engines from boneyard airliners.
Northern Virginia is the epicenter for data center construction
Curbing that increased demand will require rationing AI power increases and that’s a regulatory role. Virginia law probably requires regulated utilities to provide power to all comers at prices (including connection fees, etc.) set by regulators.
Northern Virginia is the epicenter for data center construction
Curbing that increased demand will require rationing AI power increases and that’s a regulatory role. Virginia law probably requires regulated utilities to provide power to all comers at prices (including connection fees, etc.) set by regulators.
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Bold mine. Why the ever loving fuck are executives getting massive payouts from running a public utility?
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We should just start from a presumption that any corporate merger that creates the largest anything is unacceptable. "We need to merge to be competitive" can sometimes have some truth to it, but if you are merging to exceed all competition it's no longer credible. The biggest anything inherently demonstrates that you are larger than your market needs, larger than regulators are experienced at handling.
To become the biggest, you should have to run your company well and grow.
To become the biggest, you should have to run your company well and grow.
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It will force them to be priced based on actual costs. What they're doing now is dumping, a type of predatory pricing, in order to capture the market and destroy competing industries. It artificially suppresses alternatives (e.g., human-created work), in order to create dependency on those LLMs.
It's critical that LLMs are priced honestly, so that we can figure out their true and sustainable place in the market. Everything up to that point is dishonestly-motivated disruption.
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I worked as a vendor or consultant to utilities of all kinds (municipal, investor-owned, coops, tribal, Crown corporations, etc.) across North America for 20+ years. I then worked for a municipal utility for 6 years.
Notwithstanding my personal ideological biases, I could never see a pattern as to which kind was better run. Each group seemed to have similar shares of well-run and poorly run operators.
I remain biased against privatizing municipal or nationalizing investor-owned utilities. Often moves in either direction are driven by ideological agendas and not fully thought through at the operational level.
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Classic economic theory has long held that some stuff lends itself to natural monopolies. Rather than fighting this economic fact, the paradigm for over a century had been to regulate their behavior.
Power transmission and distribution are natural monopolies. You can bust these 2 big monopolies into a 1000 pieces and you’ll just get 1000 little monopolies.
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We only ever use this kind of language when it involves the sprawling single family homes owned by rich people. You can dislike data centers for whatever reason, but buildings "looming" over the giant, lifeless suburban sprawl lawns is NIMBY-coded bullshit.
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I've been thinking a bit over the last 10-15 years about how "Capitalist America" actually looks an awful lot like an aristocracy of old, with a few gilded families ("The Dukes") owning most of the real estate and businesses in the country. They have their lesser nobles ("The Marquesses") under them - executives, hedge fund managers, owners of smaller (but sometimes still largish) businesses that are substantially clients of the larger businesses and their owners - they may be legally independent businesses, but they know where their bread is buttered and owe their loyalty to the Dukes above them. Below them are yet another set of lesser "nobles" ("The Earls") loyal to the Maquesses above them in the hierarchy, and so forth.
There is no King (although Trump is starting to look an awful lot like he's having success assuming the throne above those Dukes), but there IS an aristocracy of wealth and power in the US.
Politicians fall somewhere in that hierarchy, but, they look more like employees, put in the jobs to pull the levers of power and cast the votes that their wealthy sponsors demand of them. They don't hold the real power. They are more like the military officers under the old aristocratic hierarchy - they ultimately answer to the Dukes and Lords they are sworn to, except the Generals and Admirals who, I think, answered directly to the King/Queen?
I'm no expert on the per-Parliamentary Royal governments of Europe, but that is my general understanding of the situation - the aristocracy held title to most of the land, did some level of high-level management of the lands, but largely depended on lower vassals for the day to day management, they all had their own Armies and possibly Navies as well, but the Crown also had it's own Armies and Navies. When the nation went to war, Every Lord was expected to contribute the larger part of their military forces, as well as resources like food, weapons, medicines, and materials, etc.
We formally have a Congress and Republic, but it mostly looks like those are proxies for the aristocratic Lords of America.
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It’s harder for electric utilities to enshittify than hospitals. Hospitals are poorly regulated. Power utilities are regulated.
The one area of improvement I’ve perceived is in patient safety, thanks to malpractice lawsuits.
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A condition of power deals that benefit data centers should be that they fund installation of home solar PV systems with power equal to what the data centers expect to use. Not just subsidize, but completely pay for installation at residential sites served by the affected grid. No cash out of residents' pockets.
This would mitigate billing increases and contribute to long-term increase in grid reliability.
This would mitigate billing increases and contribute to long-term increase in grid reliability.
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100% This would solve a lot of energy and computing supply chain problems. There is too much VC money creating supply for products no one is demanding. Microsoft released 70 copilots before fixing the damn taskbar. If Windows users were perceived as Microsoft's customers they wouldn’t be trying to reboot a nuclear power plant; in reality, Microsoft sees investors and stockholders as their customers so they have to build the torment nexus before TeSpaceXAI does it first.
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This merger provides an opportunity for state regulators to turn the screws on these 2 companies to get their merger approved. NextEra and Dominion are doing this in a very challenging political climate. Pushing back against AI and higher power costs is one area of growing bipartisan agreement. Even utility-cozy regulators will have show some spine if they want to get reelected.
We’ll see what happens
We’ll see what happens
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You need massive bonuses or you can’t hire The Smartest Guys in the Room.
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it's not like it's done everywhere, right? if the infrastructure has open access i'm not sure what the issue is.
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If you own the roof over your home and it sees the sun, you should have installed solar panels and batteries by now. The rest of us are screwed
You got 40K$ plus you can hand me?
Cause if not then nope. Not that I disagree with the thought but solar is fucking expensive as hell.
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According to the NY Times, the small California utility buying power from the big Nevada power company was repeatedly given notices over something like 20 years that they needed to find another power supplier. It got multiple extensions.
I’m not sure this is a good example of NIMBY - more like poor planning? (I’d have to know the details to say for sure)
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