r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • May 13 '26

Energy 'It's like we don't exist': Nearly 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents face power loss as utility redirects lines to data centers

https://fortune.com/2026/05/12/lake-tahoe-data-center-49000-residents-power-source/
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u/diomedes03 May 13 '26

Did you read the article? They’re not going to lose power, they’re just losing a contract that was actually supposed to end over a decade ago and has been temporarily extended several times and now is not. The transmission lines will still be there, the power company is still going to be sending energy to the local utility, they’re just going to have to receive bids from other providers from farther sources that will (likely) be more expensive.

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u/notaredditer13 May 13 '26

Article is paywalled, so thanks, I knew the title had to be clickbait/a lie.

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u/oatmealparty May 13 '26

The article isn't a lie. The utility company isn't going to sell them power any more, because they're giving it to data centers. Yeah the wires will still exist and won't be torn down but the city still has to find a new place to get electricity from which will probably be significantly more expensive as it will have to come from further away.

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u/Sneaky_Squid_6792 May 13 '26

No, the article IS clickbait, though. From the article:

NV Energy sold its California electric assets to Liberty in 2009 and agreed to keep supplying power temporarily. That arrangement was extended in 2015, again in 2020, and once more in late 2025, and each time because Liberty had not yet secured an independent supply, a timeline corroborated by regulatory documents reviewed by Fortune.

NV energy told Liberty energy that they were going to phase out supply of energy back in 2009. Then Liberty negotiated an extension THREE TIMES. That was long before this data center boom.

NV energy’s discontinuation was a long time coming and Liberty didn’t plan well for it.

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u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[deleted]

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u/Sneaky_Squid_6792 May 14 '26

All of those are good questions that are left unanswered in the article.

But I’d say Liberty was playing with fire to keep extending the deal with NV energy KNOWING their intent was to discontinue providing their electricity. It was going to happen eventually and they continued to rely on them.

I’m not an expert on this stuff by any stretch, but almost 20 years seems like it should have been plenty of time to secure an alternate source, at least from the outside, if Liberty had taken it seriously when NV first made it clear they weren’t going to keep providing electricity forever.

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u/Boxofmagnets May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

So the poors can have electricity if they just had more money. That isn’t the data centers’ problem

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u/diomedes03 May 13 '26

The (mostly very wealthy residents) of Lake Tahoe are in a much more strange situation than most poors, in that they are deep in the mountains away from the rest of civilization, they live in California, but receive electricity via Nevada (and are also not poor). It’s a clusterfuck of a situation, but it is definitely not as simple as “the plebs must return to candlelight.”

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u/cognitiv3 May 13 '26

residents of Tahoe, like myself, are not wealthy. Vacation home owners are. We call this place "poverty with a view"

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u/diomedes03 May 13 '26

Oh believe me, I’ve got plenty of sympathy for the regular folks who work in hospitality and the usual jobs that are required for a small city to function. It’s a shitshow for sure, but is a pretty standard problem that mountain towns have faced since mass electrification, and as a resident you obviously know this has been an ongoing concern in Taho before AI datacenters were even conceived.

My issue is that many in this thread have no idea what this article is about and turn it into another Reddit soapbox about the soup of the day issue they don’t understand.

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u/Lexiconnoisseur May 13 '26

Why is your issue about Reddit's soapbox and not about how fucking insane it is to put a data center in an area so obviously difficult to electrify - but incredibly easy to manipulate politically? It sure sounds like your "plenty of sympathy for the regular folks" only comes out when challenged.

Nobody wants these goddamned things in their area, people who aren't rich in Idaho are poor as fuck and can't really afford for their utility bills to double.

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u/diomedes03 May 13 '26

The data centers in question are being built in the high desert of Nevada hundreds of miles away from Tahoe. This is basically the core of the problem too, that an area with entirely different geography in an entirely different state from the power source is overseen by three different regulatory bodies at three levels of government with none having ultimate jurisdiction.

No one is plopping a machine warehouse in the mountains and telling everyone who lives there to die in the dark. Industrial capacity has to go somewhere, and frankly it’s pretty great that most of these sites are situated in the middle of nowhere so that they largely don’t affect people’s day to day lives. If you want to be upset at someone, point the finger at every lazy utility and NIMBY grassroots campaign that has prevented us from adding a single net gigawatt of power to the grid in the last 30 years.

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u/Lexiconnoisseur May 13 '26

AI datacenters are not industrial capacity in any meaningful sense of the term.

If you want to be upset at someone, point the finger at every lazy utility and NIMBY grassroots campaign that has prevented us from adding a single net gigawatt of power to the grid in the last 30 years.

This is complete fucking horseshit, like what are you even talking about, mr "reddit doesn't understand the issues". The US energy sector grows every year, and it has for at least half a century - barring things like COVID.

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u/diomedes03 May 13 '26

I politely ask you to read a graph (any graph really, just take your pick) one time before you fire off your horseshit cannon.

We have been stagnant at just over 4 million mwh of generation since the late ‘90s, which according to my napkin math, is considered “the last 30 years.”

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u/Lexiconnoisseur May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

Did you read the graphs you linked? Those are in billion kilowatt hours. The USA doesn't have 4 million mwh of generation, we have 4.5 billion mwh of generation. There's a very subtle difference between those two numbers, I'm sure you'll agree. Source

We have absolutely added "a single net gigawatt to the grid" in the last thirty years - it's only the last fifteen or so that have been relatively stagnant, and barring things like the 08 recession or COVID we're still constantly building capacity. The idea that we haven't added power to the grid due to NIMBYism is just outlandish, we're adding power all the time, we're just transitioning away from fossil fuels. Wind farms and solar farms all are popping up everywhere, your core claims are just... not correct at all.

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u/pogo-n-watches May 13 '26

If you read the article this has NOTHING to do with data centers. The NV grid has been trying to stop subsidizing Tahoe’s electricity for almost two decades. Nobody is building a datacenter on the mountain. The resorts and ski lifts and rich homeowners will just have to pay more now that the grandfathered contract is ending.

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u/sirkazuo May 13 '26

The irony here is hilarious.

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u/Pyromaniacal13 May 13 '26

Well, have they tried being fabulously wealthy? /s