Dozens of people are protesting tech giant Meta’s plan to build its first Canadian data centre in a county north of Edmonton.
Ben Baril is the 20-year-old organizer of the protest in Morinville, a town in Sturgeon County, where the tech giant behind Facebook announced last month it’s building its massive one-gigawatt data centre.
Baril says the $13-billion-plus facility will strain Alberta’s water supply and energy grid, and contribute to the climate crisis in the future.
He says protesters are also against data centres across Canada because the expansion of artificial intelligence threatens jobs.
Meta has said the centre will be online in the next two to three years.
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Premier Danielle Smith has said Alberta’s grid operator will use surplus energy to power the centre until a new natural gas-fired plant — called the Greenlight Electricity Centre — starts powering it in 2030.
Pembina Pipeline Corp., Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management are behind the plant.
Not needed, not required and not wanted.
They WILL NOT bring jobs and they WILL artificially increase utility rates for everyone in the region by a substantial amount. American stories claim doubling them.
No data centers.
There is no stable surplus. Alberta has had:
1 grid alerts
2 near‑brownouts
3 emergency conditions
4 thin supply margins
5 AESO warnings about reliability
6 rising peak demand
7 generator outages
8 extreme‑weather stress e.g. heat
All this for what? Temporary construction jobs and maybe a few dozen at the operating center? It’s not like a major game company or Microsoft opening a huge campus here. People are just ass-uming!
Useless eaters cheering on their replacements. 5G/6G connecting robots to AI data centers will see a need for a major cull.
Some people are concerned that “massive amounts of land” are being consumed in a mega industrial park. Now that there is funny.
I wish these paid protesters would announce who they are being paid by when setting up protests. Secondly get there facts straight when talking about a project of which they have no understanding of what do ever!
Funny, Global says dozens, CBC says hundreds… Quite a spread between the two. Regardless, progress is progress, datacenters are coming wether people like them or not. This is the ideal environment for them, it’s cold here 8 months of the year.
So about 20 protestors?
Anti-Team Canada protesters want Canada to rely on USA data centers
Early 1900s headline:
Dozens protest the introduction of the Horseless Carriage
So a couple dozen folks paid no doubt or itherwise incentivised.
Regardless of how you feel about impact on environment, these data centers take up massive amounts of land. Never a good thing…and from what we see happening in US, these centers are not what they say they are….as usual.
Let me know when thebhypocrites cancel their data plans
They are as pathetic as the anti capitalists who lecture people using their iPad
Data center for what?
The data we already have got us what? Where?
Enough with this madness.
Anything that kevn leery cheers for can’t be good for 99.9% of us.
millions applaud it.
Again people are confused about the water usage. How would it contribute to what climate crisis. The reporter failed to mention the mental health issue of Baril.
Remember when you made the commercial showing Albertans freezing in the dark cold weather because there was no way renewables could meet demand? Where was the surplus then?