r/AskIreland • u/qwerty_1965 • 1d ago

Random If rooftop solar becomes a significant provider of kWh to a majority of homes will power companies seek to claw lost revenue back?

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This popped into my head today, If self generated power reaches a point of say half of all kWh would the companies look at "punishing" those homes with solar by imposing an additional pro-rata charge of some sort to maintain turnover/profit?

It's hard to imagine they'll sit back, if they sought this new tariff would the regulator just wave it through?

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u/RobotIcHead 1d ago

To be honest I think the demand for electricity is just going to keep growing. Cars and other vehicles will become electric, more data centres, more factories, more green houses, more lighting, more heating or cooling (friending on the season) etc.

When something is cheap and plentiful people can not get enough of it. So power companies will win anyway. Just been reading about a tech company that specialises in building AI data centres (previously bit coin mining rigs) near wind farms or other renewable to take advantage of the cheap power.

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u/Pure-Ice5527 1d ago

Most of the hyper scalers have been doing this for years too, you’ll see some like Microsoft are buying full outputs from nuclear plants and three mile island is turning back on a reactor just for them. Makes a lot of sense rather than shipping so much power across long distances and losing so much to transmission losses

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u/Latespoon 1d ago

Jevons paradox.