Another day, another politician dancing around questions that thousands of Nova Scotians want answered.
As he took media questions on Thursday, Nov 12, environment minister and Dartmouth East MLA Timothy Halman was pressed about any potential regulations the government could enact to safe keep the province from any of the negative side effects of allowing data centres to be built in the province.
When a reporter pointed out that no specific regulations were being talked about, Halman told the reporter, “We’re looking at the art of the possible. We’re looking at the possibilities of potential further regulations.”
The only regulation the project must contend with at this moment is an emissions assessment concerning a diesel-powered generator that would kick in if electrical services were interrupted, although EverWind’s CFO Matthew Tinari said the company would comply with any regulations imposed by the government.
When asked about what regulations the government might be looking into, Halman simply says, “We’ll have more to say about that.”
Pressed even further on the point, Halman still refuses to give any concrete info: “I would tell Nova Scotians there’s an on-going analysis right now, like, this is a big… of regulations, of how we could potentially bring in, strengthen the framework.”
On that note, Halman gets up to leave.
This comes weeks after the energy company EverWind, led by Australian-American CEO Trent Vichie, announced they would be putting forward $10 billion towards a data centre project in Point Tupper. It also comes one week out from a massive province-wide protest regarding the data centre’s construction.
All that Nova Scotians have to go on in terms of regulation is what EverWind has to say—that it will pay for the electricity it uses, will privately fund the entire project and will support nearby communities in the process, and from Premier Tim Houston’s Facebook post, made a couple weeks before the data centre announcement that he attended as a guest: that no data centre will increase the cost of electricity for ratepayers or do significant environmental harm, among other promises.
These are not regulation. There is no signed contract that we know of, and none of what the premier imposed on social media is legally binding in any way.
This also occurs while the federal energy minister visits Nova Scotia to tell business leaders that the future is in the energy sector, all while AI stocks go public and immediately falter and data centre projects across North America continue to shut down before even getting started due to a lack of financial feasibility. This week has been a crash-course on how volatile the AI market truly is, with stocks plummeting in the wake of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s affair.
“For some reason, this government does not want to trigger an environmental assessment on this project, and they do not want to put legally binding regulations into place governing it, and that alone should raise enormous red flags for Nova Scotians,” says opposition leader Claudia Chender in a media scrum.
