Excerpt:
LaRocque said the decision is baffling, citing concerns over rising electricity demand, massive water consumption and air pollution linked to AI data centres.
“Vancouver is in the middle of a housing crisis and water shortage,” he said. “These centres will use more heat and water — it seems counterintuitive to me.”
Air pollution’s a new one, how do AI data centers generate air pollution?
If they can’t get enough grid power, they rely on onsite generators.
Are these, though? The article had no details.
There are no details because the companies won’t share them, and the government won’t ask for them until after they are built.
In order for data centres to deliver on their promise to provide virtually continuous service, they must be able to operate under any circumstances. This means ensuring they have redundant backup power requirements to weather blackouts or any other power interruption.
Backup power for these facilities almost always means diesel generators — sometimes hundreds of them. For a 100-megawatt facility like the one proposed in downtown Vancouver, this could mean anywhere between 25 and 50 diesel generators on site, depending on their size. Diesel generators are notoriously dirty, emitting fine particulate matter associated with a host of health and breathing problems. It’s why diesel generation is often strictly regulated.
However, as electricity grids strain under demands, the pressure to switch to diesel generation at the slightest hint of a potential energy disruption has been growing. Placing that many generators directly in the middle of the urban core could be a major public health issue. Due to these challenges, the state of Virginia — home to the largest concentration of data centres in the world — concluded that the “industrial scale of data centres makes them largely incompatible with residential uses.”
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026/05/18/Vancouver-Getting-AI-Data-Centres/
The power goes out in downtown Vancouver about as often as I visit, which is to say once every handful of years. Any sort of diesel generator usage on that scale is not even worth mentioning in terms of air pollution while cars are still allowed in the city core.
BC doesn’t have strained electrical grids in cities, this ain’t Texas.
In BC, absolutely not. They will be powered by BC Hydro just like everything else. This is simply just a bunch of Fear Mongering.
