Three years ago, council approved a rezoning for a data storage centre, but Coun. Hilary Eastmure says there was inadequate information at the time about water use.
Julie Chadwick
Nanaimo city hall. Council recently passed a motion directing city staff to amend the city’s official community plan to require that future rezoning applications for data centres include detailed information on daily and yearly water use, energy consumption and energy- and water-conservation plans. TIMES COLONIST
Detailed information on water and power usage should be provided before any future data centre rezonings are approved in the city, says a Nanaimo councillor.
In 2022 and 2023, council approved the rezoning of two lots on East Wellington Road for a data storage centre.
But Coun. Hilary Eastmure said she felt “completely in the dark” at the time about what the project actually entailed.
Eastmure was elected to council in 2022, when the project was between third and fourth readings. She said none of her questions at the time — particularly about the data centre’s water use — could be answered because council was no longer allowed to receive new information. Instead, councillors had to rely on material provided to the previous council.
She made the comments in an interview this past week, after council approved her motion calling for more information to be provided for future data centre rezoning applications.
“I felt like I was being asked to have blind trust in a development that I had no real understanding around,” she said of the 2022-2023 rezonings.
“Given the degree of concern around the preservation of our water resources in general, let alone the amount of water used by the data centre industry more broadly, I think it’s a really central question.”
A data storage centre would use less water and power than an AI data centre, which has been subject to calls for stricter regulations across Canada.
IBM’s website defines a data centre as a facility that houses IT infrastructure for building, running and delivering applications and services, and that stores and manages the data associated with those applications and services.
The motion passed at the July 20 meeting directs city staff to amend the city’s Official Community Plan to require that future rezoning applications for data centres include detailed information on daily and yearly water use, energy consumption and energy- and water-conservation plans.
Coun. Ben Geselbracht said at the meeting that he was concerned at the time of the 2022-2023 rezonings about the lack of clear information on the data centre’s water usage, prompting him to vote against it three times.
The city released a statement last November that estimated the data centre’s water usage to be between 55,000 and 69,000 litres per day. That’s roughly equivalent to what is used by a car wash, or a bit more than half of what a shopping mall uses in a day, according to the city.
hat information was provided by the numbered company behind the project and came out of water modelling that occurred during the development permit stage, according to Jeremy Holm, the city’s director of planning and development. Detailed plans were prepared by the applicant and reviewed by city staff.
A water-use covenant signed in February between the city and the numbered company references an annual “rent charge” of $60,000, payable to the city.
Holm said via email that that rent charge is effectively a penalty, payable if consumption exceeds the maximum permitted water usage. Under the covenant, that maximum is 6.5 litres per second over any one-minute period. Holm said the owner is exempt from paying the rent charge if the maximum water usage is not exceeded.
The charge, which would be imposed once annually for exceeding the limit, is just one lever the city has to enforce water-use restrictions, Holm said.
The covenant also allows the city to withhold building permits and occupancy permits to ensure compliance, he wrote, adding the city can also get an injunction through the courts for breach of the covenant.
But Eastmure said it’s still not clear how much the company could exceed its maximum.
“I think $60,000, to a large corporation, is perhaps just the cost of doing business,” she said. “And it’s not clear to me if that’s a one-time fine or really, how that gets enforced if there’s a consistent overuse of water.”
Asked how much the company could exceed its limit, Holm said there is no maximum amount of water consumption for any water user in the city. At least in the case of the proposed data centre, the city has the rent-charge option, which it doesn’t have for other water users, he said.
Water use is billed by the city at a per-unit rate, which is used to pay for the cost of providing water and to encourage conservation, he said.
B.C. Green Party leader Emily Lowan said she views the $60,000 rent charge as effectively “giving a parking ticket to a billionaire.”
Lowan visited Nanaimo in May to call for a moratorium on all AI data centre construction until their risks are better understood and regulated.
That call for a moratorium was specifically for AI data centres, but Lowan said in an interview that she is “very concerned” about the Nanaimo data centre, and others that are cropping up. “They have a lot of the same water and electricity usages, from what I know.”
Nanaimo is a “guinea pig” when it comes to data-centre construction, said Lowan.
She said the centre wasn’t given much scrutiny before approval, and city council seemed to be operating with limited power and resources to effectively regulate the numbered company.
The City of Nanaimo has not yet received a building-permit application for the proposed data centre, Holm said.
The development permit for the centre, issued in March of this year, will expire if construction does not begin within two years.
“Whether or not the data centre is built and the timing of development are at the discretion of the proponent,” Holm said.
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