In September 1882, the Edison Electric Light Company began supplying power in Manhattan. After providing electricity free of charge, it sent its first electricity bill to a copper manufacturer in January 1883, once the system's safety had been established. A year later, the number of corporate customers topped 500 — the birth of electricity was a revolution in itself.
Progress in civilization always casts a shadow. When crude oil prices soared during the 1974 oil shock, the Japanese government restricted electricity use for the first time. It required large consumers to cut usage by 15% and shortened department store hours. In California, deregulation of the power market sent wholesale electricity prices up tenfold in 2000 from a year earlier. But retail prices were capped for political reasons, and utilities buckled under the strain before falling into a liquidity crisis. Delayed investment in the grid and troubled utilities led South Africa to declare a state of emergency in 2008 and resort to rolling blackouts as a last measure.
The pain over electricity continues today. A heated debate is under way over who should bear the cost of building out the power grid for artificial intelligence data centers. On one side is the argument that all consumers should share the burden, as they do now; on the other, the view that the cost must not be passed on to residential rates. Empirical studies abound showing that residents are paying more for electricity because of AI data centers. That is why the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill to protect ratepayers by barring grid costs tied to data center construction from being shifted onto ordinary households. Some state governments in Australia are pursuing similar changes.
One U.S. developer went so far as to offer $10,000 (about 14 million won) in cash per household to residents of Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, if it were allowed to build a data center there. That shows how strong local resistance to AI has become over electricity rates, noise and other concerns. For South Korea, which has set out to become one of the world's top three AI powers and to build three megaprojects, the data center power bill is hardly someone else's problem. Can the government, utilities, companies and local communities find a Solomonic solution?
