Must read first on horrid data centre health harms in Texas (citizen and environment abusing cousin of Alberta, just as stupid, greedy, polluting and corporate controlled):
2024 07 08: ‘We’re Living in a Nightmare:’ Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town by Andrew R Chow/Granbury, Texas, Photographs 
lots more excellent photos at linkby Jake Dockins for TIME
On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. “It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed,” she says. “That pain was worse than childbirth.”
Rosenkranz’s migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz’s 5-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a “red beam behind her eardrums.”
It didn’t occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses. A mother said her 8-year-old daughter was losing her hearing and fluids were leaking from her ears. Several women said they experienced fainting spells, including while driving on the highway. Others said they were wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the middle of the night mid-vomit.
None of them knew what, exactly, was causing these symptoms. But they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area—and was exceeding legal noise ordinances on a daily basis.
Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least 10 people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms. The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one.
But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor—ears, nose, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo—says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis.Living with frac noise is also debilitating and lying law violating AER serves the law violating noise polluters, not the harmed
“I’m sure it increases their cortisol and sugar levels, so you’re getting headaches, vertigo, and it snowballs from there,” Bhaloo says.
“This thing is definitely causing a tremendous amount of stress. Everyone is just miserable about it.”
Not all data centers make noise. And industry insiders say they have a technical fix for the ones that do, which involves replacing their facilities’ loud air fans with much quieter liquid-based cooling solutions. But some of their touted methods, including “immersion cooling” in oil, are expensive and untested on a large scale.And what do profit raping corporations and the rich hate more than anything? Spending money to mitigate their harms and law violations. wanna bet the oil is too expensive and the company goes to water cooling in a state with scarce water resources like Alberta?
A representative for Marathon Digital Holdings, the company that owns the mine, did not answer questions about health impacts, but told TIME that it is working to remove the noisy fans from the site. “By the end of 2024, we intend to have replaced the majority of air-cooled containers with immersion cooling, with no expansion required. Initial sound readings on immersion containers indicate favorable results in sound reduction and compliance with all relevant state noise ordinances,” they wrote in an email.Why the fuck was noise not mitigated from the get go? I bet these promises will go nowhere beyond words, and are mainly fluff to get rid of and or appease TIME’s reporters. Why not shut the fuck down, immediately install appropriate working mitigation, then, test if the mitigation has stopped harming the neighbours and consults with them before going back into operation? Easy answer: cruel corporate greed.
The number of commercial-scale Bitcoin mining operations in the U.S. has increased sharply over the last few years; there are now at least 137.
Similar medical complaints have been registered near facilities in Arkansas and North Dakota. Coming soon to drive you crazy in Dildo Danielle’s corporate raped Alberta!
And the Bitcoin mining industry is urgently trying to push bills through state legislatures, including in Indiana and Missouri, which would exempt Bitcoin mines from local zoning or noise ordinances. In May, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a “Bitcoin Rights” bill to protect miners and prevent any future attempts to ban the industry.
While some Granbury residents are fiercely protesting the mine, many others feel powerless to alter the will of a company with legal, political, and financial might.
And the data center industry at large is only growing more dominant, thanks to the twin forces of Bitcoin mining and AI, the latter which spends a vast amount of energy training generative models to find patterns in data sets.Best mitigation and support humans can provide these brutally harmed residents, is to refuse to use AI and refuse to buy Bitcoin. But, of course, our species is too fucking evil and selfish to give a shit about others, or AI devouring as much if not more water than frac’ers do, taking it away from life for other species, not just our own.
According to a recent report, data centers will use 8% of total U.S. power by 2030, up from 3% in 2022. And if operators continue to locate the centers near existing communities and prioritize profits above all else, then the story of Granbury could become the story of countless small towns across America.Alberta already has problems with a shitty unreliable extremely water destroying polluting grid (supplied mainly by toxic radioactive frac’d gas), getting worse by the day with stupid Dildo Danielle essentially banning solar and wind power to serve her big oil polluting masters.
Granbury sits about an hour southwest of Fort Worth in Hood County, which houses a mostly rural and Republican population of about 65,000 people. About a 15-minute drive south of Granbury’s charming historic town center—which includes a 19th-century opera house—lies a gas plant called Wolf Hollow II. Driving toward the plant on a windy, predawn morning in May, it rises out of the sky like an oil rig in a pitch-black ocean, lights ablaze.
But the glowing gas plant never caused substantial issues for the local residents. Rather, the problems started when Constellation Energy, which operated the plant, signed a deal in 2021 to power a new Bitcoin mining facility that would sit directly on its lot. The new facility consisted of 163 squat metal boxes resembling shipping containers, which housed a total of over 30,000 computers. These computers started running in the summer of 2022, and seemed to be switched on all day and night. As of December 2023, the Granbury mine is owned and operated by Marathon, one of the largest Bitcoin holders in the world.
The computers power a process called proof-of-work mining. Rather than relying on a central bank or governmental agency, Bitcoin is created, maintained, and guarded by watchdogs around the world known as miners, who prevent tampering through a complex cryptographic process and are rewarded with bitcoin for doing so. Bitcoin’s first supporters hoped that this new system would support a global digital currency that would bring freedom, financial fairness, and wealth to its adopters.As stupid and greedy as the freedom seeking Fucker Truckers and frac’ers promising freedom while they permanently destroy our drinking water. We’re already loaded with freedom in North America
But the system also requires an immense and ever-increasing amount of electricity.
While Bitcoin’s first miners were solo operators often working out of their bedrooms, the industry is now dominated by a handful of billion-dollar corporations who operate industrial-size server farms across the globe. In the month of March 2024 alone, the Bitcoin mining industry generated a record $2 billion in revenue.
Much of the American Bitcoin mining industry can now be found in Texas, home to giant power plants, lax regulation, and crypto-friendly politicians. In October 2021, Governor Greg Abbott hosted the lobbying group Texas Blockchain Council at the governor’s mansion. The group insisted that their industry would help the state’s overtaxed energy grid; that during energy crises, miners would be one of the few energy customers able to shut off upon request, provided that they were paid in exchange.How much is Idiot Abbott paying them after Hurricane Beryl? And what will they do when extreme heat incapacitates feeble unprepared (for climate change) grids like in Texas and Alberta? After meeting with the lobbyists, Abbott tweeted that Texas would soon be the “#1 [state] for blockchain & cryptocurrency.” The following month, the Commissioners Court of Hood County approved the development of a cryptocurrency operation at Wolf Hollow. The owners promised local jobs and said that they would mostly use “stranded energy” that would otherwise go unused.Wasting energy on highly destructive and dangerous things like AI and wasteful things like bitcoin (the world already has currencies in use) is one of the stupidest most harmful things humans could be doing right now. We need to stop wasting energy!~ And, even more importantly, we need to stop destroying water.
For months during 2022, Granbury residents Nick and Virginia Browning sat in their front yard watching the new metal boxes of the massive facility be installed in the dirt across the road. “It layered our houses with dust. We haven’t gotten it all out yet,” Nick Browning, 82, says.
The dust, it turns out, was just a prelude to the noise.
In order to cool the machines, the site’s operators attached thousands of fans to the containers, which churned constantly, emitting a vicious buzz.There are already illegal bitcoin miners in Alberta on gas plants harming residents with noise , just wait ’til Dildo Dani fills rural areas with $100B more in data centres.As more machines were switched on, the noise sounded like a ceiling fan, then a leaf blower, then a jet engine. It consumed afternoon dog walks and revved through cloudless nights, vibrating the trailer homes of many of the low-income residents who live blocks from the facility. The noise floated miles down the winding Brazos river, through the lush golf courses in the gated community Pecan Plantation and past county lines.At first, residents responded to the intrusion by vacating their porches, retreating inside, and turning up their fans and air conditioners to the max. But many still felt tremors in their beds—including Larry Potts, a 77-year-old retired pastor who lives up the road from the plant. Potts says he stopped sleeping and started losing hearing in both ears. In February, his heart gave out after another sleepless night; he was rushed to the hospital and kept alive by an external pacemaker. There, he was diagnosed with third degree atrioventricular block, hypertension, and depression.
“I’m sick of this world and all this mess around here,” he says he told his wife that day, referring to the Bitcoin mine’s noise. “We moved out here for the peace and quiet. But this has made me want to go.” Frac’ing sickened me to this world too, bitcoin and AI, and Dildo Dani’s insane ban on much less harmful energies, solar and wind, sickens me even more.
Some nearby residents say they haven’t been affected.
But the number of strange medical emergencies in the area have piled up. In addition to Potts’ discharge papers, TIME reviewed medical records provided by several Granbury residents. Hospital notes from 72-year-old Geraldine Lathers’ three-day stay document new prescriptions for high blood pressure and vertigo. Jenna Hornbuckle, 38, lost hearing in her right ear and was diagnosed with heart failure; ear exams document her hearing loss along with that of her 8-year-old daughter Victoria, who contracted ear infections that forced doctors to place a tube in her ear. And Avari Burns, a 19-year-old cancer patient, says she suffered from crippling migraines at home—but whenever she went to a Fort Worth hospital for chemotherapy, the migraines subsided.
Virginia Browning, 81, who can see the Bitcoin mine from her front yard, says she was taken to urgent care with violent vertigo after waking up one night mid-vomit. Browning says she gets so dizzy she can barely walk in a straight line, and that she rarely sleeps through the night. “When they crank this thing,” she says shakily, “I’m wide awake.”
“We’re living in a nightmare,” Sarah Rosenkranz says, sitting at a barbecue restaurant in downtown Granbury on an evening in May. As rock music blares from the speakers and other patrons chatter away, Rosenkranz pulls out her phone and clocks 72 decibels on a sound meter app—the same level that she records in Indigo’s bedroom in the dead of night. In early 2023, her daughter began waking up, yelling and holding her ears. Indigo’s room directly faces the mine, which sits about a mile and a half away. She soon refused to sleep in her own room. She then developed so many ear infections that Rosenkranz pulled her from school in March and learned how to homeschool her for the rest of the semester.
Over grilled salmon and hush puppies, Rosenkranz shares that her family has been sleeping peacefully at an inn downtown for the last three days in order to get away from the noise. But the next morning, after returning home, she contracts yet another migraine that lands her in urgent care.
Dr. Bhaloo, the ENT doctor in Granbury, says he’s seen an uptick since the new year in patients whose ailments—including ringing in their ears, vertigo, and headaches—could be related to the mine. “These people here, they’re good country folks, and Bitcoin, to them, is almost a foreign alien thing,” he says. “They don’t understand it. And [the noise] is detrimental to their health and anxiety.” Dr. Stephen Krzeminski, another Granbury ENT, agrees.
“Sonic damage is real, there’s no disputing that,” he says. Krzeminski says he believes the mine is causing “mental and physical” health issues. “Imagine if I had vuvuzela in your ear all the time,” he says.
The level of noise is appalling to Dr. Thomas Münzel, a German cardiologist who is a leader in the growing field of scientific researchers measuring the impact of urban and industrial noise on humans. For the last 15 years, Münzel has studied how transportation and urban noise, especially at night, can be debilitating stressors on the heart, brain, and cardiovascular systems. In one study, he exposed young, healthy students to noise events up to 63 decibels, and found that their vascular function diminished after just a single night.
In other studies, he’s found that nighttime noise pollution directly leads to heart failure and molecular changes in the brain, which may lead to impaired cognitive development of children and make some people more prone to developing dementia.
Encana/Ovintiv’s many compressors around my home exceeded the noise allowances set by AER. Instead of regulating the company, ordering the noise mitigated, AER regulated me, violated my charter rights trying to bully and terrify me silent, and fudged Encana’s noise data to make it appear lawful. The noisy polluting water and energy eating data centres Dildo Danielle is grubbing for will likely be much worse and bring on worse fraud and cover-up by AER.
“The European Environmental Agency tells us that everything above 55 decibels is making us sick,” he says. The fact that the Granbury Bitcoin mine is emitting 70 or even 90 decibels on a nightly basis is “like torture,” he says.
“The most spectacular cardiovascular diseases will develop. They have to stop the machines.”
Health effects have the potential to extend past the human residents of Granbury. Studies have shown that man-made noise pollution harms animals and wildlife, causing oxidative stress and memory loss in rodents, acute anxiety in dogs, and a decrease in forest growth.
Shenice Copenhaver’s dog, Persephone, started going bald and developed debilitating anxiety shortly after the Bitcoin mine began operating four blocks away. Directly next door, Tom Weeks’ dog Jack Rabbit Slim started shaking and hyperventilating uncontrollably for hours on end; a vet placed him on the seizure medication Gabapentin. Rosenkranz’s chickens stopped laying eggs for months. And Jerry and Patricia Campbell’s centuries-old oak tree, which had served as the family’s hub and protector for generations of backyard family reunions and even a wedding, died suddenly three months ago.Encana’s compressor noise stressed me and my dogs relentlessly. The dogs would pace the hallway throughout the night; when outside at night, they’d race up towards the nearest unlawful compressors snarling and barking. When we’d be elsewhere away from Encana’s compressors, those behaviours stopped.
It’s nearly impossible to prove the Bitcoin mine directly caused the afflictions of these specific animals and plants. But as the strange anecdotes collect, they’ve added to the stress of a town that feels under siege from all directions.
“I’ve lived in Texas all my life and I’ve never seen an oak tree be beautiful one year and die the next,” Jerry Campbell says on his lawn, beneath the tree’s gnarled, blackened limbs. “It’s so strange.”
Hood County Constable John Shirley has spent months trying to find his own solutions to a problem that at times seems supernatural. As a former member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia whose leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy against the U.S. government, Shirley is a somewhat divisive figure in the town. But lately Shirley has been laser-focused on the mine—an issue he considers apolitical. “When you’ve got Greenpeace supporting the same cause as a former Oath Keeper, what weird episode of the Twilight Zone are we in?” he says, chuckling darkly. (Shirley resigned from the Oath Keepers before Jan. 6, 2021, due to “serious concerns” with the direction of the organization, he says.)
On a listless May morning before the sun has risen, Shirley is sitting in his truck across the road from the mine. He is used to getting up at this hour, as he’s been taking decibel readings of the plant around the clock in order to write tickets against the mine’s operators for disorderly conduct. Shirley sticks his recorder out the window and the numbers on it flicker up and down as the roar washes over it. Eventually, the recorder caps out at 91 decibels, which the CDC estimates as roughly in between the output of a lawnmower and a chainsaw.
This level of noise, the CDC writes, can cause hearing damage after two hours of exposure. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration advises that employees can only work in 90-decibel settings for eight hours a day and are required to wear ear protection. And Texas state penal code deems any noise above 85 decibels unreasonable. Over the course of 2024, Shirley has recorded a noise above 85 decibels coming from the plant more than 35 times.
Technically there is federal mandate to regulate noise, which stems from the 1972 Noise Control Act—but it was essentially de-funded during the Reagan administration. This leaves noise regulation up to states, cities, and counties. New York City, for instance, has a noise code which officially caps restaurant music and air conditioning at 42 decibels (as measured within a nearby residence). Texas’s 85 decibels, in contrast, is by far the loudest state limit in the nation, says Les Blomberg, the executive director of the nonprofit Noise Pollution Clearinghouse.
“It is a level that protects noise polluters, not the noise polluted,” he says.
Ultimately, Constable John Shirley can’t stop the machines, because there is no state law forcing the operator of a noisy machine to turn it off. When Shirley writes a ticket for disorderly conduct, it merely triggers a $500 fine, as opposed to jail time or another punitive measure. Hood County can’t even pass a relevant noise ordinance law: only Texas cities, not counties, have the ability to do so.
Shirley’s tickets now add up to a theoretical fine of $17,500 and counting. But that number is chump change for Marathon, which earned $165 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2024 and bragged to shareholders about “record earnings.” And the company is fighting back: They have requested a jury trial to overturn this low-level misdemeanor, which starts July 8. At a pre-trial hearing in May, the company arrived with a full team of lawyers. “To bring two or three full-suited attorneys to a justice of the peace court citation issue: I’ve never seen that,” says Patrick Ryan, a local lawyer who has consulted with Granbury community members about the possibility of a civil nuisance lawsuit. “They’re coming with both barrels.”
A representative for Marathon declined several interview requests cowards with TIME, saying that the company would refrain from commenting publicly until Constable Shirley’s “unwarranted” citations against the plant had been resolved. As Shirley sits outside the facility recording the pulsating drone, his nostrils flare, and his voice rises with impatience. “When I was a murder investigator and someone killed somebody, I had the law on my side,” he says. “With this, it’s like I’m swatting at a rhinoceros.” As he reads the decibel levels on his sound meter, a security guard from the facility steps out of his car and snaps pictures of Shirley’s truck in the dark.
The residents of Granbury feel they’ve been lied to. In 2023, the site’s previous operators, US Bitcoin Corp, constructed a wall around the mine almost 2,000 feet long and claimed that they had “solved the concern.” But Shirley says that the complaints from the community about the sound actually increased when the wall was nearing completion last fall. Since Marathon bought the facility outright in December, its hash rate, or computational power expended, has doubled.
As complaints mounted at the top of 2024, the company contended it did not know about the extent of the sound issues. “We are now the owners, but we are not the operator. USBTC is still the operator. Prior to the purchase, we were not aware of the noise issues,” a Marathon representative wrote to TIME in an email in January.
“Now that we own the site and have been made aware of the issue, we are working to gather information and address the situation.”“working to” does not mean “will.”
But documents show that Marathon provided a $67 million loan in May 2021 to the site’s first formal owners, Compute North, to build out the site’s infrastructure, and Marathon’s purchase agreement of the site, dated December 15, 2023, clearly mentions the existence of the $1.9 million “sound wall” built several months prior.Sound walls are more decorative than functional, meant to con the harmed into thinking their concerns are being addressed. Encana installed a big wall too, around it’s noisiest most shoddily and cheaply built compressors nearest to my home:
The wall did nothing but create a serious fire risk and make journalists laugh.
As community complaints reached a fever pitch earlier this year, Marathon held a meet-and-greet on March 29—Good Friday, which rubbed many people in Granbury’s deeply religious community the wrong way. For the handful of people that did show up, Marathon laid out a noise mitigation plan which included turning off idle fans, moving some containers into liquid cooling by April 2024, and installing vegetation and trees around the perimeter.
In an emailed statement to TIME in late June, Marathon said that 58 air-cooled containers have been removed from the site, and pointed to a roadmap which vows to convert 50% of the site’s containers to immersion cooling by the end of the year. A representative for Constellation Energy, which owns the power plant that Marathon connects to, said in a statement that the company is “staying updated on [Marathon’s] efforts to respond to the concerns raised by neighbors… We will continue working closely with Marathon as they take actions to reduce their impacts.”
Marathon says that immersion cooling, in which computers are placed in tubs of oil, will largely fix the noise problem. But the technique has potential drawbacks, including the difficulty of regularly performing maintenance on a computer submerged in oil, says Kent Draper, the chief commercial officer of the Bitcoin and AI data center operator IREN. “Although it’s been around for a long time in the industry, it’s just not that widely adopted,” he says.
Even Marathon expressed skepticism about its ability to convert its many machines to immersion technology in a 2023 year-end SEC Report. “There is a risk we may not succeed in developing or deploying immersion-cooling at such a large scale to achieve sufficient cooling performance,” the company wrote.
In an email to TIME, Marathon wrote: “While we are confident in our ability to scale this new technology, it is our obligation, as a publicly traded company, to identify any potential risks from a financial perspective.”wow — not from a public health harming perspective. Noisy greedy abusive fucking idiots.
Granbury community members are exploring political and legal avenues. A petition against the mine in Granbury and its “excessive and unhealthy noise” garnered 800 in-person signatures, and was brought by representatives to the Texas Republican state convention in San Antonio in May, with the hopes of gaining statewide support for some sort of ban. But two local elected officials, Nannette Samuelson and Shannon Wolf, say they tried to take the floor to stump for the issue, but weren’t given time to speak. Samuelson’s goal is now to pass resolutions in commissioners court prompting state senators to draft legislation.
Any statewide legislation is sure to hit significant headwinds, because the very idea of regulation runs contrary to many Texans’ political beliefs.and much worse. regulations that are in place are just ignored by companies and regualtors in Texas and Alberta and anywhere else corporations profit-rape. “As constitutional conservatives, they have taken our core values and used that against us,” same in con provinces in Canada;it’s a widespread evil diesasesays Demetra Conrad, a city council member in the nearby town of Glen Rose.
Some community members are also exploring a potential civil nuisance suit against Marathon, in which they would seek an injunction against the company and/or damages. One affected woman, Cheryl Shadden—who has medically-documented hearing loss—has retained the nonprofit Earthjustice to examine potential litigative routes. Deputy managing attorney Mandy DeRoche says Earthjustice is exploring the possibility of taking its own sound readings near the site. The nonprofit has been involved in several lawsuits against crypto mining companies across the country.
“Historically, Bitcoin miners go to the cheapest source of electricity with the least amount of regulation, and they do the cheapest thing possible,” Just like frac’ers. And that’s why data centre corps are dancing with Dildo Danielle in Alberta.DeRoche says. “It’s one of the reasons why noise pollution from crypto mining tends to be so much worse than traditionally-operated data center operators.”
As Bitcoin continues to gain value, miners are building progressively bigger operations, causing gas plants and other fossil fuel emitters to spring back into action. It is unclear whether states even have the energy capacity to support this new demand: In June, Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick tweeted that Texans and Albertans“will ultimately pay the price” for the growth of crypto and AI data centers, writing that they “produce very few jobs compared to the incredible demands they place on our grid.”
Regardless, Bitcoin lobbying groups are attempting to pass pro-Bitcoin-mining bills in state legislatures across the country, which would exempt similar operations from noise ordinances and local zoning laws.
People have reported similar symptoms near Bitcoin mines in Arkansas and Williston, North Dakota. Ultimately, Granbury is just one canary of several in the proverbial mine.
In the week before this article’s publication, two more Granbury residents suffered from acute health crises. The first was Tom Weeks, the owner of the hyperventilating dog. On July 2, Weeks, 64, rose after another sleepless night of listening to the mine and realized he couldn’t breathe. He was rushed to a Fort Worth hospital, where he was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot blocking his lungs—and hooked up to an oxygen tank. Weeks was supposed to testify against Marathon in the jury trial, but is now physically unable to do so. “This whole thing is an eye opener for me into profit over people,” Weeks says in a phone call from the ICU.
The second person affected was the five-year-old Indigo Rosenkranz. On July 6, she suffered from a seizure and was taken to the emergency room, before being routed to a childrens’ hospital in Fort Worth for further testing. Her mother, Sarah, was terrified and now feels she has no choice but to get a second mortgage to move away from the mine. “A second one would really be a lot,” she says. “God will provide, though. He always sees us through.”
Alberta sizes up $100B data centre opportunity, but says ‘bring your own electricity’, ‘Everybody talking about the electricity constraints that are leading to difficulties in this sector’ by Chris Varcoe, July 13, 2024, Calgary Herald
Speaking to a room full of potential investors during Stampede, Premier Danielle Smith said the government has had a busy dance card this week with one industry that’s calling on the province.
Data centres.
And her advice for developers of such energy-hungry facilities that use artificial intelligence and need access to electricity generation?
Come to Alberta — but be prepared to build or bring your own power.And, your own water, and real, not promises, noise mitigation. Better yet, stay away and if already here, shut the hell down.
“In the past 48 hours, I’ve been talking about nothing but data centres and AI,” Smith told out-of-town investors gathered Wednesday at an event held by Invest Alberta, the province’s economic development corporation.
“We’ve been watching what has happened around the world and it seems like it’s really exploded in the last few months, everybody talking about the electricity constraints that are leading to difficulties in this sector . . . Bring your own electricity, bring your own generation. Partner with a generating company.”
Data centres have become a rapidly emerging opportunity for Alberta as the province seeks to attract jobsWon’t be much in the way of jobs, just the usual lies about promising them, investment and gain a foothold in the high-tech sector, although it also faces intense competition to make it happen.
According to the International Energy Agency, the coming boom in data centres, generative AI and cryptocurrencies could see its combined power consumption double by the end of 2026 from levels seen two years ago.
Large amounts of electricity for such complexes are required for computing and cooling systems.
Officials with the Alberta Electric System Operator confirmed in May it has at least six proposals for data centres in various stages of development in its application lineup that would use about 2,000 megawatts (MW) of power.
“We are a tiny part of the market right now. But the opportunity is just extraordinary,” Smith said in an interview.
“Almost every meeting I’ve had for the last two days has been around data centres and AI, and some that are 20 megawatts, some that are 100 megawatts and some that are 2,000 megawatts of energy need.”
Many jurisdictions are competing to attract such projects, but Alberta has some powerful cards to play.
These include land, access to renewable energyWTF! Dildo Danielle banned it (made rules that make it nearly impossible to install)or natural gas to power these complexes, a skilled workforce and a climate that’s colder than other places — reducing a centre’s cooling needs.but not in spring, summer or fall anymore, and even much of our wonderful winters are turning into saunas
“The potential growth of AI-data centres presents significant opportunities,” John Kousinioris, CEO of Calgary-based electricity generator TransAlta Corp., said in a statement.
Significantly, Alberta’s deregulated power market and energy-only system allows developers to negotiate with private power firms — not a provincial Crown corporation — to build new generation.
In recent years, large tech companies such as Amazon and Microsoft have announced corporate power purchase agreements (PPAs) with Alberta renewable generatorsfrac’d gas is not renwable, spurring billions of dollars in wind and solar developments.ya, that ahd to be cancelled because o f Dildo Dani’s bending over to oil and gas and banning them and then making them nearly impossible to install so as not to harm the view (while oil gas and coal, and data mining have and can continue to happily destroy views anywhere.
Invest Alberta CEO Rick Christiaanse noted that data centre developers — from large hyperscalers, such as the world’s largest tech firms, to mid- and small-sized operations — are looking for the right locationtranslation: looking for mass deregulation, deeply corrupt regulators and politicians, and on the backs of taxpayers – access to free water, land, and energy via abandoned oil and gas facilities, and guaranteed ability to walk from mishaps and clean-up to build and have recently approached provincial officials.
“When we size this in terms of an opportunity . . . from the numbers we’re seeing, it rivals what the province can do in (carbon capture) or even in hydrogen,” Christiaanse said in an interview Friday.
“This is easily another $75-billion to $100-billion opportunity.”
He expects several proposals will be headed to Alberta municipalities for consideration in the coming months. Christiaanse stressed developments would unfold across the province, not just in the largest cities.note he says would, not could. No way will cities put up with the ugliness and health harming noise; rural Albertans, again will be forced to carry the abuse
Alberta Technology Minister Nate Glubish, who is co-leading a cross-ministry cabinet committee to co-ordinate the government’s data centre efforts, said one of the biggest bottlenecks for developers globally is access to electricity.
“This is an energy infrastructure play,” he said.
“We want to prove to the world that we can build this infrastructure better than anywhere else.”Translation: Alberta says, come, invade, build, we’ll let you harm your neighbours however you like, and bonus, if you kill anyone, cause toxic noise, visual and other pollution, or walk from clean up, we’ll help you do that for no charge and lots of near zero taxes (which we’ll let you not pay at all), gifts, freebies and subsidies.
The multibillion-dollar question is how can the province, which recently has been faced with tight electricity supplies, meet the needs of Albertans while also attracting developers to build data centres here?The province can’t and won’t, ordinary Albertan will have their supplies stolen from and given to the data miners
The premier said project proponents should look at the example of the oilsands and a “bring your own electricity” approach.
Some oilsands operators have built cogeneration facilities to meet their power needs and have the ability to sell excess power into the grid.
Smith mentioned that power generation facilities and data centres could be located on a single industrial site.
“If you want to look at the model, it’s up in our oilsands. They didn’t want to wait around for us to figure out how to build generation for them. They went and built it themselves,” she told the crowd.
“That, I think, is the model for AI and data centres.”
There are other issues the province will need to tackle, such as finalizing its ongoing overhaul of the electricity system.
Greengate Power CEO Dan Balaban, whose Calgary-based company developed the country’s largest solar farm, agrees there’s a tremendous opportunity to attract data centres to Alberta.
However, he stressed the province needs a stable energy framework to develop more renewable resources.
“Many of these tech companies that are the largest customers of data centres have made very strong renewable commitments,” he said.Wouldn’t that be hilarious if Dildo Danielle’s ultra stupid solar and wind energy ban/restrictions prevent $100Billion worth of investments from coming to Alberta?!
“It’s really encouraging the provincial government has recognized this opportunity and seems to be taking it seriously. And I hope they’re keeping in mind that Alberta has many different sources of energy — renewablefrac’d gas electricity is not renewable – no matter what tall tales the Dildo’s UCP Klan spin and fossil fuel.”
It’s still early days, and data centre providers and power producers are trying to understand what the other side needs, such as connection to the grid and site requirements, said Pauline McLean, a senior vice-president with Capital Power.
“In the different jurisdictions where we do business, everybody is grappling with the same questions,” she said.
“The more clear a jurisdiction can be about what all the moving parts are . . . that will be the key to unlocking the investment.”
Refer also to:
I still can’t get over how bad AI has become. And this is coming from a computer scientist who spent over a decade studying and programming AI.
I fucking LOVE AI, but here are 10 reasons I absolutely fucking hate it now, a [thread] …
1) the massive training sets required to train them cannot be obtained legally so they are stealing huge amounts of content w/o consent, all in the name of “innovation”
https://t.co/VFFwjehGwo
https://t.co/gJjNLxAhfU
2) the energy required to run their data centers is starting to overwhelm our power grids (and during a time of climate crisis too!)
https://t.co/d4CnVEd9eX
3) the water demands for cooling said data centers is depleting our scarcest resource at an alarming rate (there’s literally not enough water to meet their projected demands!)
https://t.co/xNreI3QgEa
https://t.co/aMgdSzylDZ
4) the actual output of these AIs is usually horrendous and nowhere near good enough for release, especially not for anything that’s mission critical. Can you imagine a mission critical system hallucinating?! (That was the plot of War Games BTW)
https://t.co/AT9jFbqBor
5) AI is already killing many jobs, and it’s poised to kill even more in the near future. (And it’s doing so using stolen works in its training sets, how ironic)
https://t.co/F2uXnXJCE4
https://t.co/f1jv7CF5Fy
6) Did I mention the output of these generative AI is typically bad? Social media is beginning to be filled with AI spam posts, which is only going to increase in the coming years, making social media and the Internet at large mostly useless
https://t.co/JOlA97JtuZ
7) I talked about lack of consent with the training sets, but what about with the output? AI has a HUGE problem with generating nonconsensual porn as well https://t.co/64cAvVkbSC
8) Whenever AI is added to existing software, it’s almost always a downgrade that no one even asked for. Users hate AI. It made Google worse, it made Adobe worse, it’s making most software worse
https://t.co/KMXTAAMfd3
https://t.co/IClsBsZhnx
9) And I’m not even mentioning all the problems that come with the regular AI of old like having biases baked into the AI that cannot be controlled for, or the lack of transparency/black box nature of the training process, or the myriad of other ethical concerns…
9 cont) These problems have all been around since the first neural networks were being created. But the current gen of AI has done nothing to address them (if anything they’ve just exasperated many of these existing issues)
10) I do not see the (very little) good these AI systems are generating outweighing all the bad they are causing (and it’s only going to get worse). There’s no way to sugar coat it—these companies need to be stopped. Which deeply saddens me…
I was the kid who spent his teen years learning how to code neural networks from books at his local library! My mom was just telling me how cute it was that, as a teen, instead of partying with friends, I spent all my free time at the library learning how to code
In college I did research on neural networks for protein folding and in the development of A-life. I’ve been an AI super fan almost my entire life and was actually kind of excited when ChatGPT and its ilk were in development; it sounded like really cool tech.
Unfortunately, it’s trash. Worse than trash actually bc it’s actively destroying our planet and eroding our communities. Not only that, but capitalists who have no connection to the arts or their own humanity are actively seeking to replace all of human creation with AI.
They see artists and creators as obstacles to be overcome, impediments on their way to faster and more reliable profits. They do not understand that creation—acts of creativity—are an essential part of the human experience, and we NEED to struggle with the act of creation.
An AI could never create Beethoven’s 5th, or “The Dark Knight”, or “Anna Karenina”, bc you need to have worked on it, to have struggled, to have something to say, something human, for people to connect with. And that only comes from being human.
Hell, I can’t tell you how great it was for my spirit to have written this thread! It’s been mulling around in my head for weeks, and now that I’ve finally gotten it out, and struggled with it, do I feel great! Even little acts of creation are essential for the human spirit.
Machines… they don’t have anything to say. And they never will. At least not in our lifetimes. What we have now are soulless imitations of humans, imitations that are wrecking both the planet & society at breakneck speeds.
We need less AI right now, not more. We need to be prioritizing our people & our planet, not corporate profits. And we need a slew of new laws to protect us from the dangerous & exploitative nature of this new AI… before the machines take over… *cue The Terminator music* https://t.co/0RRZ7yPYOj