Terrence is a hand in the turbine hall of the combined-cycle plant I own outside Rawlins, Wyoming. He is 41. He stands 8 feet from a combustion turbine that pulls inlet air at 134°F in July and pushes 250 megawatts onto a 25kV switchyard that feeds the data center campus I own 14 miles north. The inference your phone just made at 3:47 AM traveled 14 miles to get here. The cheapness it required was Terrence’s.
The NIOSH-recommended hearing protection costs $86.40 per shift. I haven’t issued the muffs. The two-qualified-man lockout-tagout crew my own safety manual specifies for the 25kV switchgear is, in practice, Terrence alone, because the second qualified man is a line item I declined to budget. The manual still names two. The procedure is one. The paperwork says what the procedure says.
John R. Puri, writing in the National Review this week, is right about the demand. Data centers consume roughly 5% of U.S. electricity now; NEMA projects 55% more by 2050. He hasn’t priced the supply. The supply is a man at the bottom of the wire, and the man is the half of the arithmetic that does the work. He asks for abundance. I’ll show you where abundance comes from.
The 250 MW my Rawlins plant exports sells to my own campus at the avoided-cost rate my interconnection allows: $34.50 per MWh. The same megawatt-hour, purchased off the grid at the socialized residential-and-commercial blended rate Wyoming’s PSC sets, would cost me $48.20. The differential is $13.70 per MWh. The plant exports roughly 1.7 million MWh a year. The differential, multiplied across the year, is $23.29 million. That’s what abundance is. It’s the difference between paying the worker at the bottom of the wire and paying him not at all. Terrence’s station earns the plant, in attributed margin, roughly $4.1 million a year. The $86.40 per shift I kept isn’t on the line of that figure; it’s a rounding error I treat as found money. The two-qualified-man lockout, properly staffed, would cost me $312,000 a year across the plant. I declined the backup. I’d decline it again.
Here’s where it turns.
Terrence lost the hearing in his left ear on a Thursday in August 2024. The audiologist in Rawlins, whom I didn’t send Terrence to, told him afterward that the $86.40 of foam plugs and over-ear muffs I declined to issue would have preserved his hearing to age 65. Terrence was 39 then. He’s 41 now. The audiologist wanted follow-up. The follow-up costs time off the line. The time off the line costs me a shift. The shift is cheaper than the hearing. The hearing was cheaper than the muffs. The muffs were the cheapest thing in this paragraph, and I kept them.
The lockout incident happened next. March. The 25kV bus. Terrence was alone. He had his hands on a breaker he believed was dead. The breaker wasn’t dead. The arc-flash threw him across the switchgear room and burned through the glove that wasn’t on his hand — the $14.40 leather-and-rubber arc-rated Class 2 I keep off the purchase order. The 25kV that wasn’t supposed to be live was live. The lockout that was supposed to be two-man was one.
The glove, the muffs, and the second man, summed across the 3 shifts for a year, are $389,440. The 250 MW the plant exports for $23.29 million of differential would have paid the $389,440 sixty times and not flinched. I kept the $389,440. I’d keep it again.
Terrence spent 9 days off the line. The man who replaced him is named Wilfred. Wilfred is 23. Wilfred is grateful for the shift. Wilfred isn’t the last. He’s the same line item twenty feet higher and one winter closer to the campus. He climbs the transmission tower I own when the wind blows the line down in February. The tower is 180 feet. The OSHA-mandated 100% tie-off requires a second climber on belay. The second climber is, in practice, the ground man who hands up tools, because the second qualified climber is the same unbudgeted line item I declined at the turbine hall. The transmission line that connects my plant to my campus is 14 miles of H-frame steel on Bureau of Land Management leases. The permits were approved in 18 months, which is fast for Wyoming. The construction was approved in 18 months and built in 8. The fast permits aren’t an accident. The fast permits are the price the state paid for the $23.29 million a year I’ll run through this county for the next 22 years. The turbine hall and the tower are one ledger written at two altitudes. Terrence wrote the first draft. Wilfred is editing it.
Now step back to where I’m standing and look at the whole field.
Hollis is body 3 on the turbine platform at the peaking station I own outside Falfurrias, Texas. He is 41. The unit earns its year in about 400 hours — the hours the grid has no room and the price climbs to the cap. He changes the 210 inlet filters in the plenum, the room the turbine drinks through, so the machine can breathe at full fire on the one afternoon that matters. The air your house kept at 72 on the 31st came through his filters. He gets $30 a day to be reachable. $18.50 an hour to stand where the intake pulls. The Lord sends the south wind. I send the invoice.
August 31. The dispatch came at 4:47 AM. The day cleared 106 by noon. My unit fired and held the cap through the evening, and the 6 hours grossed $1,500,000. Hollis pulled the old filters and seated the new ones in the plenum, the warmest room on the property, because the intake air is hot and the room doesn’t turn. The confined-space rule I don’t observe would have kept a second set of eyes on the plenum door the whole time he was inside. The second set of eyes costs $111. I took the afternoon instead.
The afternoon’s gross was $1,500,000. Hollis earned $30 for the standby and $111 for the 6 hours at the platform. $141 total — the day’s all-in cost of the man who made the cap possible. That’s 0.0094% of the afternoon. The man’s life, priced against the megawatt, is one ten-thousandth of 1% of the cap, and the cap is the only number anyone in the rate filing remembers.
Marisol is Hollis with the customer inside the fence and no public at all. She operates the islanded unit I run behind the data center’s meter, the arrangement Mr. Puri lists as a reform, and it is: no interconnection queue, no rate class, no eyes. She reads the panel from a shed with no air conditioning, because the shed isn’t in the customer’s lease and the $8,400 packaged unit isn’t in mine. The model that answered the question you asked that night trained in a building cooled by the racks beside her shed. The shed stayed at 92. The contract runs 14 pages. The shed is on none of them.
The trust fund was never a savings account. It was a bet that the supply of paying bodies would never run out — a contract with a future nobody had priced. I’m removing the bodies. Every hand I keep off the lockout, every hearing I keep off the audiologist, every glove I keep off the purchase order, removes a body from the cohort that pays for the cohort. I’m cheerful about this. The portfolio is positioned. Terrence’s left ear won’t hear the inference his granddaughter’s phone makes at 3:47 AM in 2047. Wilfred’s right knee won’t hold him through the climb that delivers the megawatt to her hand. The kilowatt-hours I’m pricing this cheap will price her out of her next job. The next job pays what the lockout saves. The lockout saves what I keep. I’ve kept $389,440. The granddaughter’s name will be on a sheet I have not opened. I have not asked whose name will be on mine.
The arrangement isn’t new, and I’d rather the lesson rested on older authority than on my receipt.
“And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.”
— Exodus 21:20–21, King James Version
Scripture distinguished, in its economy, between death and discipline. Wyoming’s PSC will distinguish, in theirs, between the megawatt and the man who delivers it. The megawatt will be abundant. The man will be a rounding error in the rate filing. Scripture and the rate filing agree. The concurrence is older than Wyoming’s PSC.
The hireling fleeth because he is a hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I’m not the hireling. I’m the shepherd of the rate category.
James Henry Hammond, addressing the United States Senate on March 4, 1858, named the class that does the menial duties the mud-sill of society. He was pricing a different body in a different century for a different crop. Cotton was king then, and the mud-sill was the man who made the king possible. The afternoon is king now, and the mud-sill is the man who lets the turbine breathe. I’ve only updated the receipt.
Hollis is on the file for the 5:00 filter check. The filters are clean. The cap sits where the market sets it. His hands don’t shake, and they don’t need to. That’s the quiet thing about a mud-sill: it never has to ask what’s holding it up.
I want you to understand I’m not unusual. I’m a curriculum. The young man who ran the avoided-cost calculation in the rate filing my Wyoming affiliate submitted to the PSC arrived in my seminar believing workers’ names mattered. I’d cured it by October. By spring he ran the $13.70-per-MWh differential in 14 minutes and felt nothing about it. I’d budgeted 90 minutes for the lesson. I was, I’ll use the word, proud. The syllabus is in its fourth printing. Each printing is colder than the last, which is exactly what you want from a discipline that is maturing.
Dismiss me and you have dismissed one dean. The faculty remains.
I am grateful to Mr. Puri. He asked for abundance. The abundance is mine to deliver. The man at the bottom of his column won’t be in his column. He’ll be in my line.
Tomorrow is forecast at 106. The capacity is priced. Hollis is on the list.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.