Last week, when I first stumbled across the IESO application listing for a 400-megawatt data centre tagged to Ontario’s Algoma region, I had to triple-check the file name to make sure I wasn’t misreading. Algoma? The same rugged stretch of northern Ontario known for its foggy Lake Superior shoreline, struggling forestry towns, and winters cold enough to freeze eyelashes shut in 30 seconds? I’ve spent years covering energy and infrastructure policy in the province, so I know 400MW isn’t a trivial project—for context, that’s enough electricity to power roughly 300,000 average Ontario homes, or the entire combined population of Sault Ste. Marie, Elliot Lake, and Blind River. But the choice of location felt less like a thoughtful economic development plan and more like a developer betting no one would notice until it was too late.
The 400MW Elephant No One Is Talking About
Right now, the only hard details we have come from the public IESO application, which lists the project—tentatively named the Red Jar Algoma Data Center—as “active,” meaning assessment work is underway, with a target completion date of September 30, 2029. No specific municipality is named, no community consultation plans are listed, and the only public contact information points to Red Jar Energy Partners, an Oakville-based infrastructure firm that has already built one data centre in the province: the 100,000-square-foot, 80MW Thorold facility, which hosts more than 20,000 dedicated Bitcoin mining computers.
What makes this particularly fascinating is how few people are connecting the dots between Red Jar’s existing portfolio and the scale of this new proposal. When most of us hear “data centre,” we picture the nondescript warehouses that host our Netflix libraries, corporate email servers, or cloud storage for family photos. But Red Jar’s Thorold operation isn’t built for that: it’s purpose-built to run the energy-intensive calculations that verify Bitcoin transactions, a process that consumes staggering amounts of power with no tangible public benefit. That distinction matters more than almost anyone is discussing right now, especially in a region where the local power grid is already stretched thin: even a mild winter snap can trigger rolling brownouts in remote Algoma communities, and the local utility has repeatedly warned it can’t support large new industrial loads without billions in upgrades that will be paid for by local ratepayers.
Personally, I think the decision to keep the project’s location vague is not an accident, it’s a calculated strategy. I’ve covered enough municipal fights over industrial projects to know the playbook: lock in your grid connection agreement with the province first, before any local residents or elected officials have a chance to push back, then shop the project around to the smallest, most cash-strapped municipalities in the region, offering a handful of temporary construction jobs and a small property tax break in exchange for signing away decades of local quality of life. If Red Jar had announced they were planning to drop a 400MW facility in the middle of Sault Ste. Marie’s residential west end—the same neighbourhood that’s already organizing against the tiny 5MW QuantumEdge data centre on Yates Avenue—there would have been packed public meetings, council votes blocking the move, and weeks of negative local press before the application ever hit IESO’s desk. By keeping the site under wraps, they get to skip that entire process entirely.
Red Jar’s Track Record: A Lot Of Promises, Very Little Proof
I spent a few hours digging into Red Jar’s past projects earlier this week, and I’ll be honest: their track record does not inspire confidence that this project will deliver on any of the promises developers typically make to win over skeptical communities. The Thorold facility was pitched as a major job creator when it was first announced in 2021, but follow-up reporting from local outlets found that fewer than 20 of the roles created were full-time, permanent positions with benefits. The rest were temporary construction gigs, low-wage overnight security roles, and maintenance positions that paid barely above minimum wage, with high turnover and no path for advancement.
What many people don’t realize about large-scale Bitcoin mining operations is that they are almost entirely automated. There’s no need for a large local workforce once the facility is built, because the rigs run 24/7 with minimal human oversight, and most of the technical support is handled remotely by teams based in larger urban centres, or even overseas. So all the community gets for hosting a 400MW energy hog is a small slice of property tax revenue, a few temporary construction jobs, and a permanent increase in local power costs as the grid is upgraded to support the facility’s demand. That’s a pretty terrible trade-off for a region that has been begging for investment that actually benefits local people, not outside investors.
From my perspective, this is exactly the kind of extractive development that has plagued northern Ontario for generations. We saw it with the gold mines that emptied out and left behind toxic tailings ponds, we saw it with the pulp mills that polluted rivers for decades before closing and laying off thousands of workers, and now we’re seeing it with crypto mining, which is just the latest iteration of selling off publicly owned resources (in this case, grid capacity) to private companies that take all the profits and leave the community to deal with the mess. The fact that Red Jar is based in Oakville, a wealthy suburb of Toronto where no one would ever allow a 400MW Bitcoin mine to be built in their backyard, makes this even more galling. It’s the same old story: rich investors get to profit off of resources in poorer, rural regions, with none of the risk and none of the accountability.
The Bigger Question: Who Gets To Decide How We Use Our Public Power?
If you take a step back and think about it, this project raises a much larger question about who gets to decide how Ontario’s public power grid is used, and for whose benefit. The province has spent decades building its hydro and nuclear system as a public asset, one that is supposed to provide affordable, reliable power to households, small businesses, and public services. But in recent years, the IESO has opened up the grid to private developers who are willing to pay a premium for connection agreements, regardless of whether their projects provide any public good.
This is where the crypto angle becomes impossible to ignore. Bitcoin mining is a perfect example of a use case for electricity that generates zero social or economic value for the vast majority of people. The calculations used to verify Bitcoin transactions serve no purpose other than to secure a decentralized currency that is mostly used for speculation, tax avoidance, and ransomware payments. There is no reason a public grid that is supposed to serve the public interest should be prioritizing power for this use case over, say, electrifying public transit, heating low-income housing, or supporting small manufacturers that want to switch off diesel generators.
What this really suggests is that Ontario’s energy policy is being written by lobbyists for large industrial users, not by the people who actually pay for the grid through their monthly electricity bills. The 400MW that Red Jar wants to use for crypto mining would be enough to power 10,000 new affordable housing units with electric heating, or to support the transition of 50,000 gas-powered cars to electric vehicles. But those uses don’t come with the same upfront cash payment to the IESO that a crypto mine does, so they get pushed to the back of the line. That’s a choice, not an inevitability, and it’s a choice that is actively making life harder for low- and middle-income Ontarians, especially in rural regions like Algoma where power costs are already a huge burden for fixed-income seniors and small business owners.
A detail that I find especially interesting is that the IESO has no public criteria for prioritizing connection applications based on public benefit. They operate on a first-come, first-served basis, weighted by how much the developer is willing to pay for priority access. That means a crypto mining operation that is willing to pay millions for a fast-tracked connection will jump ahead of a community solar project that would provide cheap power to local residents, just because they have more cash on hand. That’s not a free market, that’s a racket, and it’s one that is costing Ontario communities billions in lost economic opportunity and higher power costs.
What Happens Next Is Up To The Algoma Community
Right now, the application is still in the assessment phase, which means there is still time for local residents, municipal leaders, and community groups to push back and demand transparency. The first step is for Red Jar to name the exact location of the proposed facility, so that local people can weigh in before the project is already a done deal. The second step is for the IESO to update its connection rules to prioritize projects that provide tangible public benefit, rather than just the highest bidder.
Personally, I’m not anti-development, and I’m not even anti-data centres, full stop. If this was a facility that hosted AI research for climate modeling, or provided affordable cloud storage for local small businesses and non-profits, I’d be the first to cheer it on. But a 400MW Bitcoin mining facility? That’s not progress. That’s a grift, plain and simple, designed to profit a handful of Oakville-based investors while leaving Algoma residents to foot the bill for higher power costs, strained infrastructure, and environmental damage that will last long after the crypto bubble bursts and Red Jar moves on to their next project.
The people of Algoma have spent generations fighting to have a say in how their home is developed, and they deserve better than to be treated like a sacrifice zone for private crypto profits. I’ll be following this story closely as more details emerge, and I hope the local media and community groups don’t let Red Jar sweep this under the rug until it’s too late to stop it.
