Two new data centres have been proposed for Vancouver. The announcement was promptly drowned out by objections to it. Lost in the noise: the part where they help the city hit its climate targets.
How?
The waste heat the servers throw off would be steered into two of the city’s district energy systems, displacing natural gas and the greenhouse gas emissions that come with it.
Developers have been doing exactly this in Europe for years—especially in Scandinavia, where district energy is common. Closer to home, two data centres already feed Toronto’s Deep Lake Water Cooling System, which serves the downtown core.
Vancouver’s proposed downtown data centre
It’s worth being precise about what is and isn’t on the table. The site—the Creative Energy steam plant at Beatty and West Georgia, next to BC Place—is already a construction zone below ground, where a rebuilt and expanded steam plant is going in. What sits on top is still being decided.
The office tower once approved for the spot has been abandoned; the data centre meant to replace it is at the concept stage, pitched as part of Ottawa’s push for “sovereign” AI computing kept on Canadian soil. The use itself isn’t even the novelty—the city cleared bulk data storage as a use on this site back in 2023. What’s new is the building: a ten-storey data centre its backers hope to open around 2029. No rezoning application has been filed yet, which means the fight everyone is bracing for hasn’t formally begun.
The downtown steam system, operated by Creative Energy, has 250 MW of natural gas boiler capacity. Demand swings wildly by season—roughly 18 MW in summer, up to 180 MW at the depth of winter. With Metro Vancouver’s heavy industry out in the suburbs, the steam plant is commonly cited as the single largest point source of greenhouse gas emissions inside the City of Vancouver.
The data centre’s final size hasn’t been settled, but the bigger it is, the more gas it displaces. A data centre matched to the system’s 180 MW winter peak could, in principle, retire the steam plant’s greenhouse gas emissions outright and make downtown heating zero-emission—squarely in line with the city’s climate goals. The power figures floated for the site so far are smaller than that, which would still cover the lighter shoulder-season load and a meaningful share of winter. Either way, caveats apply: separate cooling is needed the rest of the year, the heat pumps moving warmth from the servers’ cooling loop into the steam system draw their own power, and any future expansion of the district system raises the winter bar again.
Here’s where it gets interesting. A smaller data centre would be less obtrusive; a larger one would cut more emissions. Which means the bigger and greener the project gets, the more local opposition it’s likely to draw—and some usually allied advocacy organizations could find themselves on opposite sides of the same building. The climate movement may shortly be arguing with the climate movement.
The site was an office project before the pandemic, so repurposing it doesn’t come at the expense of housing.
The power of yes
Full disclosure: this contributor doesn’t agree with everything Resource Works publishes. But progressives need to be comfortable sometines saying yes—and being seen to say yes—to more than just wind farms and solar arrays. You don’t raise global living standards on the strength of “no” alone. Life is messy.
So, inevitably, is the question of where to put these things.
Data centres have become, by one writer’s measure, “spectacularly unpopular”—and much of that fury has been imported from the United States, where the backlash has been driven by enormous greenfield projects dropped onto rural communities that never saw them coming. The 40,000-acre site beside Utah’s shrinking Great Salt Lake—bankrolled by our own Kevin O’Leary—drew protests loud enough to force the approval hearing into a fairgrounds; Meta’s $10-billion campus on former cropland in Richland Parish, Louisiana, the size of seventy football fields and drawing more power than the city of New Orleans, went up next to people’s wells and back porches. When something that big arrives by surprise, without warning, without consultation,opposition is the only sane response.
Vancouver’s downtown proposal is the polar opposite. It’s a fraction of the size, on a site that has housed a power plant for half a century, in a downtown long accustomed to it—and the data-storage use was on the city’s books two years before anyone marched. Which is exactly the argument: put these things where they earn their keep—such as bolted to a district energy system—or where they bother the fewest people.
Vancouver’s lowest-density neighbourhood is Shaughnessy, which has resisted every attempt to add housing with a discipline most actual movements can only envy. It is also the richest (where the average house sells for around $5 million). There would be a certain poetry in asking its residents to host a data centre for the common good. The author, being a progressive, is well acquainted with poetry that never gets written.
Metro Vancouver also frets about long-term water supply, which invites a modest proposal. Data centres consume water—so the sensible place for one is land that currently drinks the most. Five golf courses sit shoulder to shoulder in the city’s southwest, sprinkling away through every drought advisory. Converting one would likely raise the owners’ returns, could lower the region’s water draw, leave generous setbacks from the nearest homes, and hand a few hectares back to the salmon. It would also, predictably, enrage an entirely new and equally well-heeled set of Vancouverites. The author, being a progressive, is willing to take that risk.
And if a data centre has to be a windowless box, it may as well do more than hum. Security probably rules out wrapping it in hundred-foot murals of coastal Indigenous art, however much the neighbours might prefer that to a blank wall. But nothing stops the building from being useful in other ways: industrial policy could nudge universities to test new insulation and noise-cancelling systems on the site, treating it as a living lab rather than an eyesore to be litigated.
Of every resource Canada has, intellect is the most renewable—and, mercifully, it needs no rezoning. The future belongs to whoever can solve the headaches of today’s technology and sell the fix to everyone else tomorrow. Not just to benefit developers, but the host communities, and also the people protesting today.
Matthew Klippenstein is a Metro Vancouver–based engineer.
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