08/20/2026
🤖⚡ AI data centres are coming. The question is: what will power them?
In a new Toronto Star Opinion piece, Linda McQuaig argues that Canada's rapidly growing AI sector could either become another massive source of climate pollution, or an opportunity to dramatically accelerate the renewable energy transition.
Her proposal is simple: require tech companies building energy-hungry data centres to power them with renewable energy AND add new renewable generation to the grid. ☀️🌬️
Ireland and New South Wales are already moving in this direction.
With data centres consuming enormous amounts of electricity and water while creating relatively few permanent jobs, McQuaig argues Canada shouldn't simply give tech giants unrestricted access to our electricity system. We should use their enormous demand, and enormous financial resources, to help build the clean energy system we need.
Instead, Alberta is courting gas-powered data centres, while Ontario is looking to nuclear power.
There is another path: make the tech billionaires driving this enormous increase in electricity demand help finance the renewable energy revolution.
👇 The full Toronto Star Opinion piece is paywalled, so we're sharing it below for those who would like to read McQuaig's full argument.
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OPINION | One move could prove Carney hasn’t abandoned the climate fight — yet
Aug. 20, 2026 | Toronto Star
By Linda McQuaigbsky.social
Mark Carney is a climate champion — says nobody anymore.
Hard to believe that Carney’s apparent commitment to climate action was something that made him appealing to Canadians last year, when he asked for a mandate to govern the country.
His dramatic retreat on the climate front as prime minister has left many Canadians — as we despair over B.C.’s raging wildfires — feeling deeply disappointed, even betrayed.
And now this.
On a whole new front, Carney appears poised to abandon the climate fight.
That new front is AI data centres, the faceless factories of the future, which have become a prickly flashpoint in the struggle between Silicon Valley’s powerful tech barons and communities all over the U.S. and Canada.
Oakville and Mississauga have just joined hundreds of American municipalities that are holding back data centre approvals, in response to local anger that these enormous centres consume huge amounts of electricity and water, but create few jobs.
The centres also pose a broader threat: they potentially worsen the climate crisis.
The word “potentially” is important, because the centres don’t have to make the climate crisis worse.
The centres require immense amounts of electricity to fuel the relentless computing and processing of Artificial Intelligence.
But that electricity could come from renewable energy (solar, wind, water). And requiring data centres to use renewable energy (and add to its supply) could help the transition to renewables — a transition every sensible person knows is necessary to save the planet.
But can we count Carney among sensible people?
While he’s capitulated to oil interests on pipelines, he talks apparently earnestly about the need to transition to clean energy.
Here’s a perfect opportunity for him to put some muscle behind his words.
He should follow the lead of jurisdictions — including Ireland and New South Wales — that require tech companies to power their data centres with renewable energy and to provide that renewable energy themselves, adding to the supply.
Indeed, tough government regulations could force tech companies to provide and pay for enormous new quantities of renewable energy, thereby advancing a revolution already underway.
However, Carney is taking us in a different direction.
Next month, he’s hosting a global investors’ summit in Toronto which will focus on attracting foreign capital to finance, among other things, AI infrastructure for Canada.
But he’s laid down no requirement that data centres in Canada use renewable energy.
On the contrary, Carney is on board with Alberta marketing itself as a jurisdiction that allows data centres to be powered by natural gas — a carbon-emitting fossil fuel that Alberta has in abundance and is keen to sell.
A gas-powered $70-billion data centre, to be built in a drought-prone part of northern Alberta by O’Leary Digital (owned by reality TV star Kevin O’Leary), is already facing resistance in court from Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation.
The gigantic facility, bigger than 125 West Edmonton Malls, will be “one of the largest single-site heat sources on the planet,” warns Utah State University physicist Robert Davies.
Ontario is also planning to attract data centres, and to power them with nuclear energy.
Although nuclear is considered a “clean” energy because it doesn’t contribute to climate change, it has other extremely serious drawbacks, including the unsolved problem of disposing of highly toxic, long-lasting nuclear waste.
Yet the Carney government is keenly backing nuclear energy. While Ottawa offers tax benefits for renewable energy, it provides more direct and robust support for nuclear energy (and fossil fuels).
AI is jockeying to dominate the future, with its colossal data centres dotting the landscape. We can resist this dominance by, among other things, compelling its multibillionaire owners to use and generate huge amounts of new renewable energy. Or we can allow the centres to become vast additional sources of emissions pushing us further towards climate catastrophe.
We need a prime minister tough enough to take on the tech billionaires.
— Linda McQuaig, Toronto Star Opinion, August 20, 2026
