[Saint John, NB] Lorneville | Spruce Lake Industrial Park Expansion | +1500 acres

[bingun]

Originally Posted by DyAm00394

The project listing for the new AI Data Centre is on the CCD Canada website. $47,850,000 is the project value.
https://www.ccdcanada.com/en/news/index

That's aggressive, good to see. I assume it's prep work? I know $2B is thrown around, but I'm not sure how it will be split between the building, the generators, and the hardware etc.

Some quotes from the Mayor -

https://tj.news/saint-john-south/in-qa-mayor-says-province-still-behind-on-homelessness

Let’s talk about the Spruce Lake Industrial Park expansion. Lorneville residents say they’ll keep fighting after council voted for park expansion last summer. How do you feel about that decision?

I see both sides of that coin. I understand that residents don’t want change, they want the use of the Crown land out there, and they have trails and a very idyllic lifestyle out there. But we need land for industrial parks, that’s the bottom line.

When we look around, and ask where we can go that has direct access to a highway and a road built for heavy trucks, where would we go that would already have industrial water, and that is just down the road from electricity generation – where would we go that would already have about $200 million in infrastructure there for us that we could just start to develop that land for an industrial park.

And is it an industrial park? Yes it is, but we’re also looking to have more of a business park, which is why we placed restrictions on it – you can’t have a concrete plant or an asphalt plant, or a metal crusher or shredder; there are about six or seven things that you cannot build out there, so it takes the heavy industrial out of it that people don’t want and puts in a data centre, or (facilities) that aren’t going to interrupt quality of life.

The first company to make a development pitch after council’s expansion vote was Beacon AI, who is proposing a data centre, most likely to service one of the major tech companies according to one of their own executives. Given that stories have come to light from around North America that data centres tend to use a lot of water and electricity, causing shortages and other issues in nearby neighbourhoods, are you comfortable with a data centre in Lorneville?

I would like to know what those liabilities would be, if there are any for the city and what they are. I know you can get a closed water system. I asked about the heat when we met with them, because I read that in Italy they’re heating homes from the data centres, and greenhouses, they have all that heat – in Italy they’re sending heat into all those homes, so I think there’s a lot of opportunities that can happen. And it’s not a metal shredder or an asphalt plant.

We said that we would be respectful of their situation out there, and we’d be respectful when looking at what we would put out there. Everyone has industry around them, the west side will have a 20-storey facility at the paper mill, the port is just down the street from my house, we had a raging fire here with AIM, everyone east has the oil refinery, we’re all living by heavy industry.