Canada

Everyone is over thinking this. By having this ban in place, we ensure that people that live in the area have a stable priced supply of electricity. How would you feel when you woke up one day and the bill for your electricity was going to go up because some AI data centre was gobbling up all the supply that is available?

Some will argue..."but they're paying customers too and we can make a profit!". Perverse incentives. Electricity is an utility. Not a service. Get that in your heads. Why would we even want tech companies have any say in our utilities when they could possibly become the biggest customer to the power company? What? Are you thinking that those in government will "protect" you? We have all seen what lobbying can do.

While BC has a lot of renewables, but they are still not without a cost (hydro for example floods huge areas). If Alberta was smart (lol), this is where they could transition away from oil over time, alas, they have a plant.

All of you should go do some research on how much electricity these AI data centres are using. The amount is staggering. What's even crazier is the amount of capital these tech companies have and are willing to deploy to "have it their way" - both physically and politically.

Why are they charging citizens for power used by AI and data centers? How is this not robbery?

I'm glad it is clear to my government that we have far better uses for our clean energy than crypto and AI.

Mining crypto is really only profitable when you have an abundance of renewable energy, so its a self-solving problem (unless your government is doing things very wrong by subsidizing fossil fuels)

Thank goodness. Keep British Columbia safe from those power hungry monster ai centres.

Oh wow so there ARE actually some adults in the government? Suprising but nice to see. Hopefully the children don't throw another tantrum and ruin it.. Like usual

Is it possible to use these power hogs to level demand so we can increase the power generated by Nuclear reactors (in the US portion of the grid) and decrease the utilization of gas turbines?

It's always funny when we do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Clearly this is coming from LNG lobbyists, because it's the BC industry that is most interested in gobbling up our energy matrix, and they don't have the insane valuations and Venture Capital that would allow them to compete with Crypto and LLM players for energy deals.

But in this fight between monsters, I actually don't mind taking the win of a province-wide kick in the balls of the Crypto industry because they have an outsized influence on Vancouver politics right now. And honestly, no relevant LLM training data-centers would be coming to BC anyway. Canada has no major players in the space and the US ones are treated pretty much as military-grade levels and they wouldn't dare offshore that amid this bonkers administration. So I only see this as a win with very low risks of unintended bad consequences.

While economically relevant right now, those kinds of projects are always a long term fuckup for whatever small town they decide to latch onto. Uprooting the only economic backbone of entire communities, they are most often short term gains for a few.

I seem to disagree with almost everybody here.

Canada is a natural place to locate huge data centres because it is cold. A huge expense for these data centres is cooling. They need less cooling in northern climates. They can be air cooled instead of liquid cooled. This means northern data centres are not only less expensive to operate but less expensive to build and also quite a lot simpler which means more reliable.

Let me pause here and say something to the environmentalists. They are going to build these data centres. Would you rather they build them somewhere hot where they need to consume far more energy? Why exactly? I do not understand that logic. And it is not just power. Water consumption is a massive problem in hotter climates as well? If we want to help the earth, build these in the north.

BC is a source of inexpensive renewable energy and plentiful water. It is the reason we have an aluminum industry even though we do not have the ore.

Finally, we have A LOT of space. We could have the worlds biggest data center and nobody would even know it was there.

So northern BC is an attractive place to build data centres.

Data centres are not huge job creators but they have other spinoff benefits.

But the real reason to want them is precisely that they demand so much electricity. Electricity is a product. That is taxable. We should build out our renewable energy capacity and sell it to them. We do not have to subsidize the electricity to be an attractive location (see above). We can make money.

We understand that money underlies all our other priorities right? You cannot think of something you would like funded?

And we could require or advantage the use of Canadian technology (which this demand could advance). Doesn’t Tenstorrent make their LLM cards in Quebec? Their R&D Center is in Toronto. Having big customers in Canada could bring more of that North.

And we should really have sovereign infrastructure to boot. I for one do not want all this information being shipped, processed, and managed abroad. We should keep it here.

This post is too long to have this argument but LLMs are also critical to a functioning economy and basic scientific research moving forward. People who think AI means “shitty chat bots” have no idea what they are talking about. Medical science has already been massively advanced as an example. We do not want these discoveries coming out of UBC?

Honestly, I just don’t get this thread at all. But if this is what people think, I guess it makes sense for the government to feed off that.

But this seems like seems like it is really about mining and natural gas. Hard to argue that makes this decision pro-climate. I mean, if you want to sell more natural gas, I am sure natural gas electricity generation for power hungry data centers is a good plan for that. Win win?

But let me sneak in that I certainly do not want to see rates go up for electricity in BC. I just don’t see why it has to. Increase our capacity. Charge the data centers for what the use. If anything, that will allow us to move to more renewable sources overall which should actually bring rates down for everybody.

As a resident of BC, I don't see why a ban is necessary.

Just set the price for those use cases high enough to both limit and make a significant profit off it, then use that profit to build out more clean energy infrastructure in the province (Solar, Wind, maybe another Dam if it makes sense)

Canada desperately needs sovereign AI data centers, owned and regulated by Canadians. We need a lot of investment in energy infrastructure to support this. It's good to have regulation on energy use that protects consumers, but we also need to lean into sovereign AI capacity. If we don't, we're stuck as a resource colony just selling our natural resources to places that do all the value-adding work and then sell their high-end products and services back to us, and jobs currently being protected by these regulations will be automated by foreign-owned and controlled providers. 300MWs is a start, but will likely be consumed in no time. We need much more, and we need it owned and regulated by Canadians.