There are nearly 21 gigawatt’s worth of gas-powered data centres proposed right now for Alberta, a fossil fuel build-out that if ever realized would register on a global scale, requiring potentially hundreds of billions of litres of freshwater and causing Canada’s emissions to soar.
That’s the scenario that emerges from data compiled by provincial regulators, projections from gas representatives at an industry event attended by DeSmog, and analysis from an independent expert astounded at the scale of Alberta’s proposed AI ambitions.
“That amount of power demand in a single location sounds absurdly high,” researcher Alex de Vries told DeSmog in reaction to the Alberta data centre proposals. de Vries is a PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and tracks developments in cryptocurrency and AI from an economic and sustainability perspective on his platform, Digiconomist.
“My estimate for the total global power demand of AI systems is, well, in the range of 20 gigawatts,” he explained.“You’re talking about a number that is potentially half a percent of global electricity consumption by itself just for data centres in Alberta.” Yet that’s the scale of ambition currently being discussed in the province, home to the world’s fourth–largest oil reserves and globally significant reserves of gas.
