Ontario Green Party leader Mike Schreiner is calling for a moratorium on new hyperscale AI data centres until the province establishes stronger rules governing their electricity demand and environmental impacts.
In an interview with Energi Media, Schreiner said Ontario risks approving very large new power loads before it has determined how to protect electricity consumers, communities, and the province’s broader electrification goals.
He pointed to Ottawa as an example of the scale of demand facing local utilities. Schreiner said Hydro Ottawa has received proposed data centre connection requests over the next two years that, taken together, would equal the city’s current electricity consumption.
The Ford government recently released an AI data centre playbook. Schreiner said some provisions move in the right direction, including requiring data centres to pay the same electricity price as other consumers and excluding them from some programs that provide discounts to large electricity users.
His concern is that those measures do not prevent system-wide costs from rising if the province must add expensive generation and grid infrastructure to serve the new load. Schreiner also criticized the government for favouring nuclear and natural gas generation over larger deployments of wind, solar and battery storage.
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The interview focused heavily on the competition for new electricity supply. Energi Media’s analysis of Statistics Canada data puts Ontario’s electrification rate at about 21 per cent, with little change for decades. Hislop asked whether large AI loads could consume much of the new generation that might otherwise support electric vehicles, heat pumps and electrified industrial processes.
Schreiner called that a major concern. He argued Ontario needs explicit guardrails so data centre growth does not constrain the electricity available for households and businesses trying to switch from fossil fuels.
One option would be to require large data centres to bring their own power. Schreiner said he could support that approach if the generation came from clean sources such as wind, solar and battery storage. He warned that self-generation based on natural gas, an approach being pursued in some other jurisdictions, would increase air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
Schreiner also wants stronger rules for water use and data sovereignty. He said the provincial playbook gives preference to projects using closed-loop cooling systems but does not require them. He raised a similar concern about language that prioritizes Canadian-owned data centres without mandating Canadian ownership.
Schreiner said AI can still play an important role in Ontario’s energy transition, including managing smart buildings and electricity grids. He argued that the technology itself is not the problem. The policy question is whether Ontario can accommodate fast-growing data centre demand while also expanding electricity use in transportation, buildings and industry. He said the province should establish enforceable rules before allowing hyperscale projects to rapidly expand their claim on Ontario’s power system.
Those rules, he added, should make clear who pays for new capacity, what environmental standards apply, how projects are prioritized when local grids are constrained, and how much electricity remains available for broader electrification across the province.
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