But the cost of electricity is not falling—it’s increasing. Wholesale prices have decreased, but retail rates are up. In the U.S. rates are up 27% over the past 4 years. In Europe prices are up too.
That's a bit of a non-statement. Virtually all prices increase because of money supply, but we consider things to get cheaper if their prices grow less fast than inflation / income.
General inflation has outpaced the inflation of electricity prices by about 3x in the past 100 years. In other words, electricity has gotten cheaper over time in purchasing power terms.
And that's whilst our electricity usage has gone up by 10x in the last 100 years.
And this concerns retail prices, which includes distribution/transmission fees. These have gone up a lot as you get complications on the grid, some of which is built on a century old design. But wholesale prices (the cost of generating electricity without transmission/distribution) are getting dirt cheap, and for big AI datacentres I'm pretty sure they'll hook up to their own dedicated electricity generation at wholesale prices, off the grid, in the coming decades.
Most large compute clusters would be buying electricity at wholesale price not at retail price.
But anyway solar and battery prices have just reached the tipping point this year only now the longer power companies keep retail prices high the more people will defect from the grid and install their own solar + batteries.
But data centers pay wholesale prices or even less (given that especially AI training and, to a lesser extend, inference clusters can load shed like few other consumers of electricity).
And this is great news as long as marginal production (the most expensive to produce, first to turn on/off according to demand) of electricity is fossils.
