I know the anti-AI crowd doesn't want to hear anything about "facts", but AI datacenters do not actually use that much energy compared to other industries, they don't particularly harm the environment compared to other industries, and they aren't causing water issues in Canada because we aren't building them in deserts like the stupid Americans.

The numbers sound big when "GIGAWATT DATACENTER" is being broadcast in the news, However, in the scale of other industries it's pretty reasonable considering we don't need one in every city or anything. Two or three in the entire country maybe. The demand for AI isn't infinite, and the efficiency is getting better fairly rapidly right now.

For context, we built the Kemano Generating Station (A dam near Kitimat) to produce almost 900 MW of power to be used almost exclusively for smelting aluminum, and it's still used for that purpose. 50% of the current generation capacity in BC goes to mining, foresty, and oil/gas accounting for something like 7-8 GW of total power in BC alone.

In Alberta, 75% of electricity produced goes to Industry, which results in an even larger total usage than BC.

BC Hydro has already implemented regulations to restrict AI datacenters to 300MW of new capacity per year to keep things stable based on them building capacity, so if anything it will likely keep energy prices down for consumers because of the stable growth and predictability. BC hydro completed purchasing agreements for an additional 8 Gigawatts of Wind and Solar at 7.4 cents per KWH to start coming online at the beginning of the 2030s.

Not sure why they think there's going to be a ton of environmental harm, BC has one of the cleanest energy grids in the world and we're not adding new fossil fuel plants or anything at this point. They are extending some existing ones, but it's literally two plants. Alberta's new Meta datacenter is going to burn Natural gas that would otherwise be exported to be burned to power datacenters elsewhere, which just saves on needing pipeline capacity for that export.

Water use is another bullshit argument, again, we aren't building these datacenters in a desert. The two proposed datacenters in BC that everyone is yelling about, and the Gigawatt Meta datacenter in Alberta aren't even the type that uses water evaporative cooling, so they will have no impact on water consumption. Our climate here in Canada doesn't require evaporative water cooling as the only option, we can build them with closed systems and the companies are already picking those options because they don't want to piss people off.