Telus’s plans for two Al data centres in Vancouver could hit a wall, with a city councillor pushing to pause them until the city sorts out some actual rules. OneCity Vancouver Councillor Lucy Maloney is bringing a motion to council on July 15 called “Addressing the Risks of Digital Infrastructure,” according to CTV News.
Don’t waste BC Hydro’s precious power on those garbage ai buildings.
The city doesn’t decide if they get a hydro hookup, BC Hydro does. The city could approve the zoning and BC Hydro could be like, nah.
Hydro is already running ads telling us to conserve water. I think I know which way they’ll lean.
Neither of these two proposed Datacenters in Vancouver or Kelowna are planning to use water evaporation for cooling, so there will be effectively 0 water usage.
BC power is hydro electric generated. More power means running out of the reservoir water that powers the dam.
It’s not that simple.
Drinking water comes from three reservoirs: https://metrovancouver.org/services/water/reservoir-levels-water-use
- Capilano
- Seymour
- Coquitlam
Only the Coquitlam dam is impacted by hydro use: https://metrovancouver.org/services/water/watersheds-reservoirs
The water use planning for Coquitlam can be seen here: https://www.bchydro.com/toolbar/about/sustainability/environmental_responsibility/water-use-plans/lower-mainland/coquitlam-buntzen.html
The diversion for drinking water (MVWD) is downstream the power houses, meaning drinking water diversion is limited by power generation. Further, this station is used for auxillary and peaking because they are not efficient/old.
Sidenote: the trails at the Capilano reservoir are magical ✨ I ended up there by accident a few years back and nwas blown away. Accessible by public transit too!
That’s why the power for projects like this is being set up to be auctioned in a competitive process.
https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2026ECS0005-000095However, it’s not really a problem at the moment, we aren’t short on power capacity. Did you forget we just spent a stupid amount of money building the new Site C Dam?
It’s not the power output max, its the hot summer and lack of precipitation lowering water level, which effects the dam at some point
Hydro supplies the water?Sorry, I was wrong in assuming this was an error. I didn’t realize overuse of reservoirs was a factor in the capacity.
But I don’t understand which way you think they will lean?
In the past their marketing has always told people to conserve electricity (the thing they sell). I’m reading the switch to conserving water to mean they know they’re going to be diverting significant water from sources for generating dams to “something else”.
Hold on… A few things stand out to me.
Why do you think they want people to buy energy? (Regulated)Hydro companies always want people to conserve electricity because it means they don’t need to be constantly upgrading the transmission grid.
Secondly, what would they be diverting water to? Who is they? Hydro may physically control the dams and valves but if you are saying the water needs to go to the data centre when the water is going to come from Metro Van water department, in which case the city does get a say because development is only approved if there is enough capacity. If the data centre is using a lot of water, so much so that it will impact HydroBC in terms of lower reservoirs, it’s going to be a massive demand in the city run water service.
If you have questions about how these things are controlled I’d be happy to help answer them using the public documents from these utilities.
Well godspeed, Councillor Maloney.
I use to work for telus and I have lots of friends there still. Everyone is told to use AI and gets $1000 a month. If you hit the limit, they’ll up you to $2000. They’re also spending millions a year on lift and shift VMs into GCP which are not cloud optimised. This year they did a tonne of layoffs in chunks. Directors were told to cut 30%.
I’m sure if they don’t get their DC, they’re just going to keep burning money to use AI, more to fight the City Councillor, and then more to build the DC in the end because there’s no way prices will come down.
This lift-and-shift VMs to the cloud frenzy reminds me of TD circa 2018.
If anybody is interest, RBC currently has the largest ai dc in Canada. The telus ones are much smaller.
This is just a info, I’m not trying to make a point about anything.
