Not only do they become obsolete quickly, these chips are specially designed for large language model algorithms. Which means if the AI bubble does burst they’re going to be effectively worthless. It’s a big game of hot potato

A new utility would also have zero guaranteed income, making it very difficult to raise the capital for the project and even harder to pay it off. Building a new utility is on its face a ridiculous proposal, which is why it hasn’t been studied.

We could build entirely duplicative infrastructure, it’s just not economically feasible. Alex above is right that there hasn’t been a study on it directly, but it doesn’t take a study to know that building new is more expensive than buying used.

What this means is that if Ann Arbor wants to use a utility other than DTE (which has the 4th dirtiest energy mix in the country, 2nd worst reliability, and 21% higher bills than the national average) our only option is to create our own public electric utility.

Nearly every municipality in Michigan has an exclusive and perpetual franchise agreement with their energy utility. However the exclusivity does not apply to the municipality itself, under the home rule city act a municipality always has the right to run its own power utility.

The SEU is a great stop gap measure that could add more solar capacity to the city, but it has no hope or stated ambitions of servicing 100% of the city’s demand. If we want to reach 100% renewable power, the only legally and financially feasible route is through acquisition.

If we were to just build all new infrastructure we’d need to compete for customers, and we wouldn’t be able to make rates competitive. The start up capital is too large to do that, and it wouldn’t be a financially feasible project. Municipalization by acquisition has been shown to be feasible

Building a greenfield utility is an extremely difficult and unrealistic prospect. It’s important to remember we’re not just acquiring infrastructure, we’re acquiring customers. The customers the utility acquires pays for the cost of acquisition.

A long critical email is a very old person thing to do

It is not in the interest of DTE to produce a legitimate valuation of their assets. The city should not take their feasibility study at face value. Ann Arbor residents I hope you’re paying close attention. You should control your electric bills, not an investor owned utility like DTE.

We’re here to support public power!