This is a positive step and something that seems rather basic but unfortunately isn't common.

I work with municipalities in Ontario, Canada. I was surprised to learn that only Toronto is required by law to maintain a lobbyist registry. Some municipalities have it in their bylaws and do so voluntarily. That still relies on individual staff knowing and understanding the requirements. I've been surprised how many times I've had to say, "Hey, should this meeting be registered?" and for municipal staff to have no idea it was required or how to comply.

Hold on... A few things stand out to me.

Why do you think they want people to buy energy? (Regulated)Hydro companies always want people to conserve electricity because it means they don't need to be constantly upgrading the transmission grid.

Secondly, what would they be diverting water to? Who is they? Hydro may physically control the dams and valves but if you are saying the water needs to go to the data centre when the water is going to come from Metro Van water department, in which case the city does get a say because development is only approved if there is enough capacity. If the data centre is using a lot of water, so much so that it will impact HydroBC in terms of lower reservoirs, it's going to be a massive demand in the city run water service.

If you have questions about how these things are controlled I'd be happy to help answer them using the public documents from these utilities.

Sure you could take a sentence in a reply explaining a very specific scenario and apply it to every situation, but that would be foolish and a waste of time.

Electricity was stupid expensive in the 90s in Ontario so it made sense to invest in cogeneration engines to burn digester gas or even natural gas and use the electricity on site. Then electricity got cheaper so it still made sense to burn biogas generated on site to lower your peak demands especially if you were paying time of use or you were Class A and needed to do load shedding. Sometimes you'd even get a discount from the electricity company for running your systems because it meant they could delay increasing the grid.

Now, the financial incentive is for carbon credits. You don't get those if you burn on site, you just get to buy less taxed fuels. If you instead upgrade the gas to renewable natural gas (like what is described in the article) and put that in the natural gas grid, you can sell the carbon credits to companies who are required to offset their own generation. I think that is where the money is in these schemes.

(That and the tipping costs for food waste, free slowly digesting material to regulate the digesters in the form of the manure, outsourcing the annoying regulatory bits to the farmers, and building goodwill for green data centres)

The operation, run by Pennsylvania-based Ag-Grid Energy, is the first of its kind in the country. The company claims the anaerobic digestion of manure and food waste could be a game-changer, not only in powering crypto, but data centers, which currently use 4.9% of the country’s electricity, a figure that could double by 2030.

There are a handful of net energy producing waste treatment processes in the world, and they all achieve it by taking advantage of hyper local opportunities to optimize. They are not infinitely scalable. For example, T. PARK in China takes sludge from several wastewater plants and uses the energy to power one of them.

Further, it is not truly net positive if it leaves residuals that need further treatment.

The project claims to recycle more than 45,000 gallons of food waste per day and the manure of 4,000 cows. “What we want to do is also provide, if possible through fiber optics, [the] value of the AI computing capacity to that same regional area,” Akki says.

The energy isn't in the manure. Wastewater plants use food waste (co-digestion) to boost methane production of digesters. Some places get the food waste from a municipal green bin program but that's a giant pain and wastewater plants tend to prefer food waste from food manufacturing. So it's unclear if this is diverting the food waste from landfill. The best solution would be to reduce the food waste in the first place. Can you call it green if it is the result of over production?

Don't get me wrong, I am pro-biogas. In municipal wastewater treatment the best results for biogas production come when you direct as much short chain carbon to the digester, which greatly reduces one of the highest electrical loads on the plant (blowers to oxidize carbon).

You're still burning it though. It looks good on paper because the CO2 emissions don't count in Canadian GHG reporting because the source is biogenic. Doesn't change the fact that there are emissions.

The digested waste, or digestate, is meant to be recycled, potentially into a range of products, such as fertilizer and animal bedding.

The energy to turn digestate into a fertilize product is pretty massive. Many of the plants that are energy neutral incinerate and the ash is landfilled.

Digested manure can be more polluting than manure that hasn’t been digested, according to USDA research.

Eeeehhhhh... Technically true but only because people are allowed to operate digesters poorly. I was talking to an engineer in the states who told me his digester was losing 30% of the methane by leaks and I was sitting getting second hand panic but apparently that's not super illegal? We would have problems with the environmental regulators and the TSSA.

The project intended to send about 41,000 gallons of waste per day into a tributary of Walla Walla Creek, which empties into Lake Michigan.

Excuse me what

There are some high level engineering plans available.

Some highlights:

• daily food waste estimated to be 225 tonnes and it may require on site processing.
• less than half of the digester feed will be manure.
• Digesters are mesophilic meaning they need to be heated to and maintained at ~35 C
• heat for the digester is provided by burning fuel oil 🙃 (most municipal plants burn the biogas)
• gas upgrading is by chilling, filtering and compressing for transport via pipeline. No mention of energy demands.
• the project would add runoff capture for manure storage which didn't exist before.
• the manure needs to be pretreated before digestion to remove sand
• the project agreement means Vanguard is not responsible for the waste products after the gas is removed.
• the project will create waste with more nutrients than the farm can land apply on their site. (You know, due to the additional food waste). There are therefore no details about what the plan is for the digestate.
• based on a news article it sounded like they wanted to build a pipeline to transport it to other farms for land application. That might be where the waste to the creek idea came from? The pipeline was to go under the creek. Maybe that was just if it broke?
• the enclosed engineering drawings are civil/structural only, no indication of power demand or fuel consumption.

There is also an air pollution permit application available. Additional details about the project include

• two 750 kw emergency generators (diesel powered)
• two natural gas boilers at 4 MMBTU/hr (unclear if this is instead of the fuel oil in the other doc?)
• the pressure relief system was to have a flare, which is positive. It is better to flare gas in an energy versus just venting.

The nutrient management permit application is behind a log in so I can't see it but this article has statements from Vanguard that contradict the engineering plans.

Hanselman says the company never uses human waste in its digesters, which is how PFAS would enter the equation and that the sources of the other organic food waste would likely be byproducts from dairy processing and beer brewing.

The application included provisions for accepting packaged food. The packaging is where the pfas is.

The process Vanguard’s co-digesters use to clean the digestate on the back end, Hanselman says, allows for nutrients to be removed and taken away. That allows the farm to limit the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen that is spread on the farm’s land. He noted that at the company’s first project in Vermont, they’re removing 12 tons of phosphorus per day from the environment.

This is explicitly untrue for the Waupaca project? Vanguard has no part in digestate treatment. Sometimes there is phosphorus removal during H2S removal (if FeCl is used) but this project used a scrubber. So no nutrient reduction.

I obviously can't speak for every project, but this example project would increase the amount of nutrients the farm has to manage (because of the trucked in food waste). It would increase energy consumption, and there was no plan for what to do with the digestate. It's not even clear if there is a net methane release reduction over their previous methods because the carbon in the food is more likely to convert to methane in the digester. The more slow to break down carbon from the manure may still end up on fields.

Food waste digestion needs a less biodegradable feed stock to make the process more stable. In municipal wastewater you balance raw sludge (easily digestible) and secondary sludge (less easily digestible) to ensure the acetogenisis step doesn't poison the methanogens step.

I don't see a benefit to the local community in this proposal at all. If they treated the wastewater using energy efficient methods then maybe? But not this project as it was proposed. Vanguard gets the slowly biodegradable material, land to use, to be absolved of responsibility to deal with byproducts. Seems like a bad deal.

I think it was more than likely an innocent mistake. I'm sure we've all misinterpreted things in the past. It's also possible I am mistaken. I'm not in their brain and I might have misread it too.

Like I said, I reached out to the author. If they get back to me and it turns out I was wrong I will correct it here.

I started writing the comment below which was going to include a comparison of the text between the two bills but when I pulled up C-37 reference to the UN declaration was still in there? The linked article may be misinterpreting the reporting it references which was written in May before the draft text was published. That article says:

Michael Rosenberg, who represented some 260 First Nations in the class action settled in 2021, said those communities are being shut out by Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty and have not seen a draft of legislation meant to ensure those same First Nations have access to clean drinking water.

Totally valid concerns, but again this was before the text was published. It has now been published. There is nothing in this article saying the rights based language has been removed.

I think he article linked in this post may have misinterpreted this passage:

She did not explain how the new bill will affirm the right to clean water after the passage of legislation in June that speeds up the approval timeline for major infrastructure projects and gives cabinet the ability to sidestep some environmental laws.

That was a specific question related to how the new bill will interact with a different bill. It has nothing to do how C-37 may differ from C-61. I think this is a significant error in the article linked here. I will submit an error report.

I'm not defending the feds. I'm going to leave the rest of the comment I started writing which is my opinion of how the inclusion of the rights based language may be important symbolically, but is only in the preamble, and plays no role in the actionable and inforcable sections.

Original comment:

The failure of the federal government to meet their obligations to indigenous communities is genocidal, full stop. Don't tell me the feds can run complex and dispersed military programs, train new recruits as soldiers, but can't set up sustainable water programs.

While I'm glad this is in the news by whatever means, I do take issue with the framing for two reasons:

1. That text has only symbolic power
2. It frames it as an issue caused by this government and not hundreds of years of genocide.

It is valid to point out that it removes language from a bill that had at least some input from the communities it serves, which is certainly a big fuck you to the people who have given their energy to crafting it.

The article doesn't include the details so I will put it here. From the old bill (C-61), the only possibly actionable references are the following:

From Section 5 (Purpose):

*United Nations Declaration

(3) The making of any decision under this Act is to be guided by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the principle, referred to in the Declaration , of free, prior and informed consent as well as Article 10, paragraph 2 of Article 29 and paragraph 2 of Article 32 of the Declaration. *

Not "shall", but "is to be". I'm not a legal expert so not sure where that falls on the Shall to Should spectrum, but as it is in the Purpose section it's not especially binding.

The only thing in the original bill that the government is required to do is "make best efforts" to start consultations and cooperation by different time limits specified in the different sections. (Which by the way makes it even more infuriating that a choice was made to call an election before this bill was passed, surely the other parties could have been asked to support the government until it could be passed?)

I will also point out that the sections on funding (Section 27(3), Section 30 ) makes no reference to water as a human right.

In my experience it is super location dependent. I've worked with municipalities who had shit locked down and others that made me think I was getting punked. All in Ontario.

I joined the industry in the early 2010s and it was a hot topic then too. This was when Stuxnet was in the news. ISA published Industrial Automation and Control Systems Security standards (ISA99) in 2002. It's not new.

I wonder how connected the folks who make decisions about utility cyber security are to each other. I learned almost everything I know about SCADA security practices via people I met through provincial wastewater industry associations and just letting them infodump lol. I don't know that any of the municipal SCADA people I worked with were members or participated. Maybe they are just trying to go at it alone vs collaborating and learning from each other. You don't know what you don't know!

I'd also be interested to know how old the PLCs at that plant were. We have zero details about this attack but when the Rockwell/AB exploit was in the news people were talking about buying cards off eBay because they are using discontinued PLCs. Can you imagine?

So, even if the staff understands the risk it doesn't mean they are getting enough money to do anything about it. Utilities are so underfunded. It's another ticking time bomb along with all those neglected pipes in the ground.

It has been clarified that the hookup wasn't without the knowledge of the utility, it was a failure of a new transmitter/verifying they were getting readings.

https://thecitizen.com/2026/05/11/behind-fayettes-qts-water-controversy-a-missed-meter-8000-workers-and-a-massive-construction-project/

I work in this realm and as soon as I read the quotes from the utility in the first batch of articles it was immediately clear that people who didn't have all the information were responding to inquiries. Your average utility employee, even in admin functions have zero media training. If I had a penny for every time I had to deal with the fallout of some ambitious comment that was taken out of context by the media or public, I'd have several pennies.

I might also suggest that a public sector dedicated to balancing the resident water demands and industry water-use demands could improve the rate/volume of consumption. But that would require a public voting base / private executive staff that valued the long-term health of the state rather than the short term economic growth of the local neighborhoods.

I think what most people are missing is that the water consumption was unmetered. Let me put it this way: the water plant knows how much water it's making at any instant, but there is a huge delay in knowing what the "revenue flow" is. There is always loss in the system between what is produced and what is billed.

I don't know this specific system, but if they couldn't detect the pressure loss without customer complaints, it wasn't some catastrophic increase in demand. As an example, water main breaks with uncontrolled lost flow are detected in the distribution system when pressure cannot be maintained or local pumping stations are running nonstop to maintain pressure. Low pressure is a safety issue so it gets investigated asap, and increased pumping will probably get flagged as suspicious or at least someone will need to explain why the electric bill is so damn high.. Utilities have leak detection tools they can use, and this would have been deployed if there was evidence of a sudden huge increase in demand because the symptoms would have been the same as a leak.

What is more likely is that the mismatch between production and billed flows was being audited and the local complaints about water pressure was the clue that helped them identify the culprit.

We can look at water loss reports here: https://epd.georgia.gov/watershed-protection-branch/water-efficiency-and-water-loss-audits

Their 2024 Infrastructure Leakage Index (ILI) was 7.02 with a validity score of 71, with the 2023 and 2022 results being 3.46 (70) and 3.37 (66). I'll bet that lit a fire under some bodies ass!

Articles on the topic contain statements like:

“We get this notification from Fayette County water system saying you need to stop watering your lawns to help conserve water,” said James Clifton, an attorney and property rights advocate who obtained and shared the 2025 letter to QTS.

“So the first thing they do is lean on the individuals and the citizens to stop water consumption when we have QTS that’s just absolutely draining us — most months it’s the No. 1 consumer of water in the county,” said Clifton, who is also running for a seat on the Fayette County Board of Commissioners.

It really annoys me that this is shared without analysis. The instruction to stop water lawns is entirely unrelated to the data centers water use.

The systems planning documents show the water sources are sufficient for the projected demand in 2070, but the production capacity (treatment plants) needs to be expanded. Even though there were a lot of losses in 2024, the system was still opening in their capacity. Local pressure losses are a reflection of local bottlenecks, not overall system capacity issues.

Further, the water conservation is mandated by the Metro North Georgia Water Planning District and their Water Resource Management Plan which:

requires that Fayette County Water System develop an irrigation pricing schedule that recognizes the impact on peak demand from irrigation.

These restriction have been in place since at least 2007, according to my tired eyes.

Anways, I'm not trying to defend the data centre. I'm just annoyed with all the misinformation about this specific case. The root cause is likely administrative.

While not the case for this specific county, things like non municipal water supply for industries including animal agriculture are a massive risk to water sheds. These water users are subject to far fewer audits and checks, so if they are withdrawing more than permitted they are unlikely to get caught. Water tables drop and municipal supplies are impacted, but again without the means to identify the cause.

Attention on this specific case and all the misinformation about it is a distraction from other massive water users and their impact.

ETA: https://thecitizen.com/2026/05/11/behind-fayettes-qts-water-controversy-a-missed-meter-8000-workers-and-a-massive-construction-project/

Lol, it was a comms failure

Yes...someday...

The more the merrier.