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Infrastructure·

Both Hands on the Grid

By Kris Krüg

What the data-centre protests get right, where governments are getting it wrong, and a framework for building AI infrastructure with communities, not on top of them.

Both Hands on the Grid

The intelligence explosion needs a power source, and the power source needs a conscience. So here’s where I stand on the machines we’re about to pour into our backyards: critique in one hand, curiosity in the other, and I’m not putting either one down to make anybody comfortable.

Why I'm writing this

Twice this summer I sat down with doctoral researchers who study, of all things, how communities feel about data centres. It's patient, unglamorous work — knocking on doors, asking ordinary people what actually goes through their heads when a windowless server hall the size of a shopping mall gets proposed down the road. Their study runs across borders: a site in Wisconsin, another spread across Washington and Oregon, and this year a researcher doing her fieldwork right here in British Columbia. I told her she'd have trouble shutting me up. I care about this more than is strictly healthy.

Part of that is personal. I was born in the American Midwest, and one of the fights they pointed me toward is in Menomonie, Wisconsin — a town of about 16,700 where a Delaware shell company called Balloonist LLC, fronting an undisclosed "tech giant," proposed a $1.6-billion data centre on 300 acres of farmland. The residents organized, asked the hard questions the developer wouldn't answer, and in January 2026 their city council rewrote the zoning and killed it. Then they did the thing I actually admire: they built a toolkit so the next town wouldn't have to start from zero.

The other part is professional. I run the BC + AI Ecosystem Association, Canada's first community-powered AI network — coming up on 300 dues-paying members in our first year, more than a dozen regional chapters, and a standing seat in rooms where this technology's future gets decided. I spend my days talking artists, founders, students, and public servants out of fleeing this stuff and into engaging with it. So I'm not a Luddite and I'm not against compute. But I've read enough industrial history — in a province that knows in its bones what it feels like to be the place other people's futures get extracted from — to know that "the future's coming, get on board" is not an argument. It's a sales pitch, and I've been pitched by better.

Here's the thing the researcher and I kept circling back to: the strongest position in her interviews isn't no. Most people aren't protesting AI as such. They're contesting the way it's being rolled out — the giant, absentee-owned box that lands in the backyard with a benefit story and a non-disclosure agreement stapled to it. That distinction is the whole ballgame, and almost nobody in the public fight is drawing it cleanly.

So here's my position, up front, before the numbers. I'm not Team Fossil, and I'm not Team Fantasy. I'm Team Outcome. The AI build-out is real and it is not going to un-happen because we wish it away. The only question worth arguing about is whether it happens to our communities or with them. That's the whole paper. Everything below is me trying to earn that sentence.

The scale is real — this is curiosity's ledger

Let me give the boosters their due, because a critique that won't admit what's genuinely happening isn't worth the paper.

AI stopped being software a while ago. It's heavy industry now. It eats copper and rare earths, it eats land, it eats water for cooling, and above all it eats electricity in quantities that should make you sit up. Meta is building a single data centre called Hyperion that will draw five gigawatts — a small province's worth of power, running flat-out around the clock to train one model. That's not a metaphor for scale. That is the scale.

The independent numbers hold up. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found U.S. data centres already burned about 4.4% of the country's electricity in 2023, and could hit 6.7% to 12% by 2028 — a tripling in five years. Globally, the International Energy Agency's Energy and AI analysis has data-centre electricity demand roughly doubling to about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030 — more than all of Japan uses today — with the AI-specific slice tripling. In 2025 alone that demand grew 17%, five times faster than electricity demand overall, riding more than $400 billion in AI infrastructure spending.

And here's the honest part, the part I hold in the other hand: some of this could be worth it. Compute is genuinely useful. It moves drug discovery, climate modelling, materials science, translation, accessibility, wildfire detection — and yes, the creative work that pays a lot of my community's rent. I have been more productive and more creative with these tools than at any point in my life, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise to win an argument. I hold that fully, no apology.

But civilizational infrastructure is exactly the kind of thing you build deliberately — eyes open, on your own timeline — not with a gun to your head and an NDA on the table. Which brings me to the other hand.

The bill comes due in the community — this is critique's ledger

The problem with the build-out was never that it uses resources. Everything uses resources. The problem is who pays, who profits, and who decides — and right now those three answers are pointing in three different directions.

Who pays for the power. In the PJM grid — the biggest in North America, 67 million people from Virginia to Chicago — the 2025 capacity auction cleared at a record $269.92 per megawatt-day, nearly nine times the prior year. The grid's own market monitor pinned roughly 38% of that on data centres — about $6.3 billion of $16.4 billion. Ordinary households are eating it in their monthly bills right now. Virginia's own legislative watchdog, JLARC, warned in December 2024 that satisfying unconstrained data-centre demand means so much new generation and transmission that the cost gets shifted onto all ratepayers — including everyone who never asked for a server farm. Northern Virginia now hosts about 13% of the planet's data-centre capacity. The externalities are socialized; the profits are not. That's not a bug in the model. That's the model.

Who pays in water. Berkeley Lab estimates U.S. data centres drank about 17 billion gallons directly for cooling in 2023, plus another 211 billion gallons indirectly through the power plants feeding them — and direct use could double or quadruple by 2028. Companies are improving (Microsoft and Google both report better water efficiency), but the industry barely discloses facility-level numbers, which tells you something on its own. And now let me be honest about our own side's honesty problem: "one query costs two bottles of water" is a killer protest line and a lousy unit of measurement. We don't price a table, a car, or a haircut in gallons; the industry gets singled out precisely because that number lands in the gut. That doesn't make the worry wrong — a watershed is finite, cooling is real, and a drought doesn't care about your quarterly ESG report — but if we want to be trusted, we have to tell the science straight, not just the scary version. Liz Marshall's question still cuts: is AI draining this world for another? Ask it honestly and it hits harder, not softer.

Who pays in the jobs that never show up. This is the one that actually makes me angry, because it's the promise every council meeting hinges on. Here's the reality: a finished data centre is one of the least labour-intensive big facilities you can build. Two of them in Cedar Rapids, Iowa — over $1.3 billion invested — were on the hook to create sixty-one permanent jobs. Georgia shovelled hundreds of millions in tax breaks at the industry and, on audit, ended up paying about $289,000 per permanent job it could actually count. A typical facility runs on a few dozen full-timers, half of them contractors. The efficiency that makes these things profitable is the exact same efficiency that makes them garbage anchors for a local economy. Nobody says that part out loud in the ribbon-cutting photo.

None of this adds up to "don't build." It adds up to this: the ledger, kept honestly, does not balance itself. Somebody has to make it balance — and that's a political choice we are mostly choosing not to make.

The consent problem — the part everyone is actually fighting about

Listen to the people out protesting data centres — and I have, at more than one Vancouver demonstration this past June, where the chants ran from "No data centres" to "Fund schools, not AI" — and you notice something underneath the noise. Below the specific gripes about water and power and farmland, nearly every complaint is really about one thing: consent. Decisions getting made before the community is even in the room.

And the industry has earned every ounce of the suspicion, because it has built an actual machine for dodging consent:

  • Secrecy by design. Developers routinely hide behind shell companies, project code names, and NDAs signed by the very public officials who are supposed to work for us. The watchdog Good Jobs First found that of at least 36 U.S. states subsidizing data centres, only 11 will even tell you which companies got the money. Public Citizen documented NDAs in 80% of Virginia localities that host them. In Tucson, residents only learned "Project Blue" was Amazon after the vote, when a document got mailed to a journalist by mistake. In Menomonie it was a Delaware shell. You cannot give informed consent to a counterparty you're not allowed to name — that's not consent, it's a signature on a blank cheque.

  • Environmental injustice, out loud. In South Memphis, Elon Musk's xAI installed as many as 35 methane gas turbines while holding a permit for 15, then ran 59 unpermitted turbines at its second Colossus site — in Boxtown, a mostly Black neighbourhood where cancer risk already runs about four times the national average. It took the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center threatening Clean Air Act litigation to force the issue. That is not a rounding error in the build-out. That is the build-out telling you, out loud, whose lungs it considers expendable.

And here's the part of "consent" the fight keeps tripping over, the part I want to plant a flag on: consent isn't real when the power gap is total. We spent the last decade learning, in every other corner of life, that "they agreed to it" means nothing when one side holds every card — that's the entire logic behind statutory limits on who can consent to what, and why a power imbalance can void a "yes" that was technically spoken. Now watch it scale up to the civic level. A rural community of a few thousand people — no standing organizing network, no legal budget, a two-week comment window slipped in over a holiday — is not a free and equal party across the table from a $15-billion counterparty with a federal partner and a wall of lobbyists. The researcher said it plainly from her fieldwork: the places already fighting effectively are the cities, because cities come with organizing muscle and political networks already built. The small towns — where the biggest facilities actually get sited — get the announcement first and the meeting second. That asymmetry isn't an accident of the process. It is the site-selection strategy.

I've been saying versions of this for years, so let me put it flat: governance is set by whoever shows up. The shell companies, the code names, the comment windows timed for the week between Christmas and New Year's — every one of them exists to keep the community from showing up until the concrete's already poured. Menomonie's real win wasn't stopping one building. It was refusing to be kept out of the room.

The movement, read honestly

Now the harder thing, because loving a movement means being straight with it.

The anti-data-centre movement is mostly right — about process, water, ratepayers, consent, the theft of the creative work that fed the training sets, the jobs that never materialize. And here's what I need its critics to actually hear: you can grant every complaint about the movement and it still works. Yes, some of the signs are unsophisticated. Yes, "use your brain, not AI" collapses under about four seconds of scrutiny — nobody marches with use your brain, not your calculator. Yes, the messaging slides from a precise, winnable demand ("no data centre on this block without real consultation") to a fuzzy one ("what about the water") to the frankly absurd. Grant all of it. The movement is still doing the single most valuable thing on offer: it is dragging power to the table. Cities are pausing builds to do the consultation they skipped. Ministers who wouldn't return an email are suddenly hungry to "dialogue." That's the whole point. The value was never the veto. It's the summons.

Where the movement genuinely runs out of road is the blanket "No data centres" itself. That slogan is the mirror image of the boosters' "get on board or get left behind," and it fails for the exact same reason: it pretends the choice is binary when it isn't. The compute is coming; it's going somewhere. If it doesn't land in a jurisdiction with clean power, real labour standards, Indigenous rights law, and a functioning civil society, it lands in one with a gas turbine, a tax holiday, and an NDA. "No, not here, not ever" doesn't stop the machine. It just aims it at the community with the least power to say no. That's not a victory. That's a hot potato with a human cost.

So I hold both hands here too. The doomer who says refuse and resist is being just as lazy as the booster who says adapt or die. The useful stance is the one the Menomonie residents actually took: not "never," but "not like this — not in secret, not without consent, not without our fair share, and not until you've answered our questions in public." That's not obstruction. That's citizenship with its sleeves rolled up.

One more honest note, because trust is the whole currency here. There's a quiet hypocrisy threaded through this entire moment, and the movement is not exempt from it. Look closely at who's holding the megaphone and you'll find plenty of people who use these tools every single day — the same way a teacher quietly runs their lesson plans through AI while accusing their students of cheating with the identical tool. That's human, and I'm not here to scold anyone for it. But a movement gets more durable, not less, when it can say the honest version out loud: I use this. I've chosen not to use it for some things. And here's the messy middle we have to govern together. That's a harder speech than "no." It's also the only one that survives contact with reality.

How our politicians are handling it — the Canadian mirror

Here's where I get parochial, because I think Canada — and British Columbia specifically — is lining up to fail this test in a very Canadian way, and I would very much like us not to.

We have an extractive reflex wired deep. Vancouver's stock exchange is basically a global casino for junior mining companies; we see a resource and the lizard brain asks how do we flip it, not how do we build with it. Watch that reflex hit AI and you get Alberta. Kevin O'Leary's proposed "Wonder Valley" near Grande Prairie would be a $70-billion, up-to-9-gigawatt, gas-powered data-centre complex — and the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation says it got "zero consultation" about the use of its traditional territory, and fired a cease-and-desist at the premier. That's the old colonial script, word for word, with server racks where the pipeline used to be. Dig it up, ship it out, apologize at the ribbon-cutting.

Quebec shows you the pivot in real time: it slammed the door on crypto mining and swung it wide open for AI, roughly doubling its large-data-centre power rate to about 13¢/kWh and drafting new rules to match. British Columbia has, to its credit, shown a spine. BC Hydro paused new crypto connections back in 2022, and in late 2025 it moved to a permanent ban on new crypto mining while carving out a deliberately modest, competitive call for power — up to 400 megawatts over two years, split 300 for AI and 100 for other data centres, opening in early 2026, tabled by Energy Minister Adrian Dix. The message underneath is exactly right: not all compute is created equal, and we get to choose what kind of digital future we power.

I want to be fair to that, because it genuinely beats Alberta's open-door approach. But being the best actor in a race to the bottom is not the same as getting it right, and the BC story has a second half the press releases skate right past.

In May 2026, Ottawa's AI minister, Evan Solomon, stood up in Vancouver with TELUS to announce a "sovereign AI" cluster: an expansion of TELUS's Kamloops facility plus two new Vancouver data centres — one of them, the M3, in my own neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant. It starts at 85 megawatts of BC Hydro power, scaling toward 150 megawatts and more than 60,000 GPUs, under Ottawa's "Enabling large-scale sovereign AI data centres" program. Now read that back against the cap. The province deliberately rationed AI power down to a scarce public pool — and the anchor tenancy went to the incumbent national telco. Ottawa's own words for its AI strategy are to grow the industry by "championing innovation leaders." Champion the champions. It's an honest description of the policy and, I'd argue, the whole problem: it makes life frictionless for incumbents and brutal for the upstarts — the frontier builders, the co-ops, the Indigenous-led projects — who are the only ones who'd actually change who owns this future.

And notice what still isn't nailed down. As of the announcement, no federal funding had been committed or distributed — the terms of the public's stake are being written right now, in real time. That is precisely the moment the public should be in the room, and precisely the moment it isn't. From where I sit in Mount Pleasant, the local land-use process for a data centre felt like a short online comment window dropped over the December holidays, advertised in the blandest language available, naming neither the company nor the federal partner. Whatever the legal minimum was, it was met. Whatever consent means, that wasn't it.

Now zoom all the way out, because here's how it looks from where I stand. Canada's federal AI money has quietly sorted the country into roles — Ontario gets the compute-and-capital story anchored by its big institute, Quebec gets AI ethics and governance, Alberta gets to be the energy patch — and British Columbia gets handed the pick-and-shovel job again: a resource province with a modest carve-out and a defence-adjacent angle off the coast. I don't think most parents sending their kids to UBC realize we've been quietly slotted back into the role of the country's resource outpost, this time with GPUs in the pitch instead of just gas. And the "we can't afford to do it differently" excuse dies on the balance sheet: at the very moment BC was rationing AI down to 400 megawatts, it was committing billions to the North Coast Transmission Line to electrify LNG, ports, and mining in the northwest. The power is there. The capital is there. What's scarce isn't electricity or money. It's the political will to spend either one on us.

The failure mode is the same across every one of these governments: they oscillate between boosterism (jobs! investment! sovereignty!) and reactive bans, and mistake the oscillation for a policy. It isn't one. Neither reflex asks the only question that matters — what do we get, verifiably, in exchange for our power, water, and land — because answering it demands disclosure, and disclosure is the one thing these deals are engineered to prevent.

And here's the fact that should reorganize everyone's thinking north of the 49th: in December 2025 the BC Court of Appeal confirmed that our Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act gives UNDRIP real legal force in this province. In BC, free, prior, and informed consent is not a value statement anymore. It's the law. So when a developer here asks for a fast, quiet, consult-later process, the honest answer isn't just "that's wrong." It's "that's illegal." Alberta is finding out the political price of pretending otherwise. We should not have to find it out twice.

The institution we forgot to build

I have to sit with the heaviest thing in this file, because it's the reason none of this is abstract.

In February 2026, an eighteen-year-old walked into Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in northeastern BC and killed five children and an educator, after killing two members of their own family. It later emerged that OpenAI had internally flagged and banned an account linked to the shooter months earlier, and told no one who could have acted on it. British Columbia is now suing OpenAI; the families have filed their own suits.

I raise it carefully, and only because it makes a point no energy statistic can. When that flag went up inside a multinational, there was no one in our system for it to be handed to. No commission, no duty-to-report regime, no institutional receptacle built to receive an AI-safety escalation and act on it inside our own laws — because a company emailing a premier about a private user would itself be a privacy violation. We hadn't built the thing. The lawsuit is right, and the lawsuit is not enough, because you cannot litigate your way into an institution that doesn't exist. If we mean what we say about caring, the work is to build the receptacle: the regulation, the standing body, the clear and legal line a company like that is obligated to pick up. And if there's a settlement, the honest question isn't "who do we blame." It's "what do we build with it." That is the entire difference between a society that is governed and one that is merely marketed to.

The dialogue is broken — and the hype is cracking

Meanwhile the public conversation has collapsed into what I call the Binary Trap: boosters versus doomers, each performing total certainty, neither one useful. And it's collapsing at the exact moment the ground is moving under both of them.

Start with a statistic everyone in Ottawa loves to misread. Canadian small-business AI adoption is among the lowest in the G7 — around 12% — and the reflexive conclusion is that Canadians are backward, ignorant, or just need more training. But the SFU Centre for Dialogue's two-year study found the opposite of ignorance: between 2024 and 2026, British Columbians' awareness and understanding of AI went up — and so did their concern. By 2026, 79% were "more concerned than excited" (up from 72%), and 65% said the risks outweigh the benefits. You cannot pin that on people not knowing enough. They know more, and they're more wary. The adoption "lag" isn't a knowledge deficit; it's a rational read by people who've correctly clocked that the upside has an out-of-town address — and who are being asked to swallow all of this against the backdrop of an economic war with the country next door. Like I've said before: this isn't Luddism. It's wisdom wearing work boots.

And the hype really is cracking. MIT's NANDA project found in 2025 that about 95% of enterprise generative-AI pilots showed no measurable return — tens of billions spent, almost nothing on the P&L to show for it. I'm not calling a crash. I'm pointing out that we are being asked to hand over gigawatts, watersheds, and farmland on the strength of a revenue story that hasn't materialized yet. When the infrastructure is permanent and the returns are speculative, the community deserves to be the senior creditor — not the last one paid when the music stops.

Two things poison this dialogue worse than any bad number. The first is the cult of inevitability — "it's happening, get on board, you can't stop it." We can accept that as half-true and still refuse to be silenced by it, because "inevitable" is doing an enormous amount of dishonest work. Can we pause a year to think? No. Six months? No. A single weekend, for one national conversation? Somehow, still no. A future that can't survive one weekend of public deliberation isn't inevitable. It's just well-funded.

The second is worse, and it's creeping out of the accelerationist fringe and into rooms with reasonable people in suits: the argument that any pause is immoral — that if we slow down, we're on the hook for all the future humans who won't be born, won't be cured, won't be lifted out of poverty by the optimized world we were too timid to build fast enough. I have watched a version of this delivered from a stage by a consultant. It's a con dressed as ethics. It conjures a fantasy of the future, measures the gap between that fantasy and reality, and bills the difference to anyone who dares raise a hand. That's not accounting. That's coercion with a spreadsheet.

The way out of the Binary Trap isn't to split the difference between hype and doom. It's to change the axis entirely — from are you for it or against it to what does it cost, who consents, and can you prove the benefit. Liz Marshall calls the disposition CASK: Curiosity, Awareness, Skepticism, Caution. Hold all four at once. That's the conversation I want the researchers, the protesters, the premiers, and the tech founders all shoved into the same room to have — and one more group besides. The pace of this thing is not neutral about who gets heard: the printing press took two centuries to spread, the telegraph one, television fifty years, mobile phones twenty-five, the web twelve, AI maybe six. Our deliberative institutions — and the elders we prize precisely for judgment and long memory — are built to move slowly on purpose, and they are getting lapped. Designing a politics that can move at this speed without throwing away the people who can't is not a footnote to the problem. It might be the whole problem.

What I actually want — Team Outcome, in writing

Critique without a proposal is just complaint, so here's the proposal. If AI wants our gigawatts, it owes us gigaton outcomes — real, measured, verified, not a marketing deck. And before the asks, the vision, because you don't beat a bad story with a list of demands. You beat it with a better story.

Here's mine, and it's built for this place: clean, green, just, Indigenous-owned, hydro-powered tokens as British Columbia's export to the future. We have the water, the hydro, a reconciliation mandate that is now law, and an AI research base most provinces would trade for. And we know how to do this, because we've done it before — a smart, long-running interactive digital media tax credit (made permanent and bumped to 25% in 2025) is a big part of why British Columbia grew a creative-tech cluster of 250-plus companies and 16,000-plus jobs in games, VFX, and animation. That ecosystem didn't fall out of the sky. It got organized into existence. So do it again with compute: keep the best of it home to power our creative industries and our researchers, carve a slice for education and public innovation, and sell the surplus at a green premium to the Fortune 500 buyers who still have real sustainability commitments and will pay a few points more for a token with a clean provenance and a checkmark they can defend in an annual report. That's not charity. That's a moat.

And it means being honest that there's more than one shape this can take. The default — a giant absentee hyperscaler — is not the only way to deliver AI to people. Two of us sitting in a restaurant already have AI-capable chips in our pockets that cost us two grand and spend the day doing nothing. Networked community compute, mesh models, co-ops, Indigenous-led facilities on northern hydro — these are genuinely different animals from a gas-fired box in a Black neighbourhood's backyard, and our policy should be able to tell them apart and prefer the good one on purpose. Now the asks, concrete, for BC and any jurisdiction serious about doing this right:

  1. A public Compute Registry. Every data centre over 10 MW discloses, publicly: power source and carbon intensity, water use, methane controls if it burns gas, waste-heat recovery, local employment, and any Indigenous-nation partnerships. No registry, no interconnection. Sunlight is the cheapest regulation we own — and it's the exact one these deals are engineered to avoid.

  2. Consent, not consultation — and equity, not benefit crumbs. Where a project touches Indigenous land, Nations get board seats and ownership stakes from day one, not a late-stage benefit agreement slid across the table after the permits are signed. In BC, DRIPA already points here; leadership means going past the legal floor into genuine partnership. Indigenous data sovereignty — the FNIGC's OCAP principles — is the working prototype for how every community should relate to this infrastructure.

  3. A community stake, not just a community meeting. If public power and public land are what make a facility possible, the public should own a piece of what it produces — a share of capacity or revenue routed to host First Nations, local universities, community operations, and, yes, a per-resident dividend into something like a sovereign compute-and-wealth fund. Put what we keep into the announcement, and the whole fight changes overnight.

  4. Make the load pay for the load. Ratepayer households should not be quietly subsidizing a hyperscaler's grid connection. Ireland now requires new data centres to bring their own generation or storage sufficient for their demand. Ring-fence the costs, and pair it with mandatory demand-response — when the grid is stressed, compute flexes. No exceptions, no carve-outs for the biggest players.

  5. Kill the NDAs. No public official signs a non-disclosure agreement with a data-centre developer, and no council votes on a project whose true owner it cannot name. Menomonie proves this is winnable at the municipal level tomorrow morning.

  6. Seed the upstarts, don't just crown the champions — and pay the people whose work built this. "Champion the champions" leaves the frontier builders, the co-ops, and the Indigenous-led projects fighting over scraps. Rebalance it. And there's an obvious, unused lever sitting right there: the creators whose copyrighted work trained these models are the same people who most need retraining and support. Fund them to lead the upskilling, and pay for it with the plain recognition that they were the raw material all along.

None of this is anti-business. It's pro-the-business-that-actually-makes-sense. The tech giants are already restarting nuclear plants and signing gigawatt power deals; they know better than anyone that the energy math doesn't close without enormous clean power. The only open question left is whether that expansion happens to communities or with them.

Coda: both hands, still full

I keep coming back to those researchers, patiently gathering what people actually feel, and to Menomonie, and to the strange comfort of a cross-border fight that turns out to be one fight wearing different hats. A farmer in Dunn County, an artist in Mount Pleasant, and a Cree Nation north of Grande Prairie are all, right now, being asked to trade land, water, and public trust for a revenue story and an NDA. And all of them, in their own idiom, are saying the same three words: not like this.

That's not fear of the future. It's a demand to be a co-author of it. People don't want the future to simply happen to them — agency is the whole ask — and the province that offers real agency will run circles around the one that offers inevitability.

The intelligence explosion is coming whether we're ready or not. The only real choice is whether we power it on our terms or theirs — methane monitors on, registry public, consent real, outcomes measured instead of promised. I want the machines. I want them badly enough to insist we build them right. Curiosity in one hand, critique in the other, and I am not putting either one down.

If AI wants gigawatts, it owes gigaton outcomes. Let's measure that — not the vibes.

Sources & notes

A position paper, not a peer-reviewed brief — but every number here is sourced inline, and contested figures are flagged as such. Key references, consolidated:

Kris Krüg is Executive Director of the BC + AI Ecosystem Association. BC + AI runs practical AI programs, community labs, meetups, and Film Club screenings across British Columbia.