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Watch the video.

These companies are regulated and can only charge for the costs they incur plus a flat profit on top of that of 10% or so.

The datacenters give allow them to justify building a lot more capacity to serve them. That increases costs, which means that 10% added for profit is now a bigger number and they can give bigger returns to their shareholders. But those profits are extracted from the existing customers who now see higher bills to cover the costs of expanding capacity to serve the datacenters.

It's a question of aligning incentives.



(Why) are the datacenters not (also) charged (pun intended) for this?


Because they are given a sweetheart deal to attract them to that specific area. And that deal happens behind closed doors.


Can you link the .PDF with this evidence?


The whole capped profit creates the distortions you illustrate.

The effect has a name: the Averch–Johnson effect, named after the Harvey Averch and Leland Johnson paper: "Behavior of the Firm Under Regulatory Constraint"

Fun stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averch%E2%80%93Johnson_effect




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