British Columbia proposed legislation to limit how much electricity will be available to artificial intelligence data centers, and moved to permanently ban new cryptocurrency mining projects.
The government of Canada’s third-most populous province will prioritize connections to its power grid for other purposes like mines and natural gas facilities because they provide more jobs and revenue for people in BC, the energy ministry said Monday.
“Other jurisdictions have been challenged to address electricity demands from emerging sectors and, in many cases, have placed significant rate increases on the backs of ratepayers,” the department said Monday.
That’s a reference to US states like Virginia and Maryland, where a proliferation of the power-hungry data centers needed for AI appears to be pushing up citizens’ power bills, according to a Bloomberg analysis. BC “is receiving significant requests for power” from these industries, Energy Minister Adrian Dix said at a press conference.
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It’s always funny when we do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Clearly this is coming from LNG lobbyists, because it’s the BC industry that is most interested in gobbling up our energy matrix, and they don’t have the insane valuations and Venture Capital that would allow them to compete with Crypto and LLM players for energy deals.
But in this fight between monsters, I actually don’t mind taking the win of a province-wide kick in the balls of the Crypto industry because they have an outsized influence on Vancouver politics right now. And honestly, no relevant LLM training data-centers would be coming to BC anyway. Canada has no major players in the space and the US ones are treated pretty much as military-grade levels and they wouldn’t dare offshore that amid this bonkers administration. So I only see this as a win with very low risks of unintended bad consequences.
While economically relevant right now, those kinds of projects are always a long term fuckup for whatever small town they decide to latch onto. Uprooting the only economic backbone of entire communities, they are most often short term gains for a few.