The Olds and The News
Regardless of what you think of AI, it's going to be used as a vehicle for economic development in the future. It seems that for Alberta, there is going to be a big push for data centres that power AI. Both the provincial and federal government have budgets or policies for AI use or future data centre construction. Nowhere is this more evident with the recent news story of the town of Olds, AB. They are currently grappling with data centre development with Synapse Data Centre Inc.
There is a compelling case to build data centres in Alberta. We have attractive geographical elements like cold climate and access to natural gas. The proposed development in Olds will be approximately 115 hectares large and feature not only the data centre itself, but a natural gas plant that will power the data centre. The Albertan government pushes a “Bring Your Own Generation” model so that the electrical consumption of data centres doesn’t affect the provincial grid.
There are a lot of issues with data centres that I think videos like this show. Obviously, it’s based in the US in the state of Georgia, but it highlights some of the issues that come up with data centre development in general such as:
Water pollution
Noise pollution
Light pollution
Emissions from electricity generation
Effects to the electrical grid
You can also look up a multitude of well written news articles from sites such as The Walrus and CBC, that go into a lot of valid concerns of local Olds residents. You can also read the emails and letters in the correspondence section of this Olds Council Agenda that echo worries about pollution as well as the abrupt appearance of this development.
It does seem like there is an effort to address some of these issues. There is a regulatory framework in Alberta that regulates water use (Alberta Environment and Protected Areas) and power plant construction (Alberta Utilities Commision). The natural power plant attached to the data centre is not attached to the provincial grid and should therefore not affect your electric bill. There has been a preliminary noise impact assessment done and Synapse claims that water use will be mitigated as the data centre will run off a closed loop cooling system and the accompanying natural gas plant will only use about 1.5% of the Olds current monthly water consumption a month. To Olds’ administration's credit, they seem to be keeping an arms length from Synapse and are trying to answer public concerns. They are merely providing an industrial land use zone, and have no other financial share or incentive aside from the broad positive externalities of having an attractive development that increases the tax base.
From a planning and development perspective, things seem to be under review right now. According to Olds, Synapse has submitted a development application which is currently under review. The site was rezoned to an industrial use zone on Feb. 9 and was already considered an industrial area in Olds long range plans. What’s concerning to me is that Synapse has made a public statement that they want construction to start in March (i.e THIS MONTH). I am not completely well versed in development timelines, but that sounds insane. Recently on March 6, the Alberta Utilities Commission has rejected Synapse’s application for building a power plant. If construction is going to start, it most definitely won’t be in March.
Data centres will be a pressing one for Albertan municipalities in the future. There is a decent chance that people currently enrolled in our planning school right now will have to grapple with these issues, especially since a lot of our planning students start their careers in rural municipalities throughout Alberta. I would encourage everyone to keep track of this development as a case study for data centre implementation in Alberta.
Of course, this is all in service of software applications that metastasize information and are owned by the richest people on the planet, but that’s a subject for another day….
Written by Media Committee Member Raymond L.