Although many people see the drop in oil prices and resulting recession that happened as a disaster for the local economy, futurist Nikolas Badminton says it clears the way for a new future in Olds, built around renewable energy and high tech.
In fact, he says in addition to becoming a cannabis production hub, there's great potential for Olds to do everything from growing fruits and vegetables hydroponically to becoming a magnet for giant data processing centres.
"I've got a friend who runs a greenhouse technology company that enables you to grow tropical fruits in places like this," he says.
"We want these things; we don't necessarily want to import everything that we need. Imagine if you could grow bananas in Olds, Alberta, right? Anything's possible with these technologies that come."
Badminton was the morning keynote speaker for the annual PowerUp! Entrepreneurs Conference, held Tuesday, Nov. 6 at the Pomeroy Inn & Suites.
Badminton says Olds has the perfect climate to attract data centres, which usually contain a huge number of networked computer servers to remotely store data, process it and/or distribute it.
Badminton says the cold winters we may curse could be the big selling point for high-tech firms looking for ideal places to locate such centres.
"Because it's cold and it's dry and data centres generate so much heat and they spend so much money on electricity cooling down servers," he says. "You use the external temperature to bring down the overall temperature of the servers."
He notes one such huge centre, for Facebook, is located in Sweden.
Badminton says big data firms would also likely be very attracted by the fact that Olds, through O-NET, has great connectivity.
Badminton says Olds has another advantage.
"You've got a lot of sunshine here so you can have a lot of solar generation that generates the electricity to run the generators. This is hugely attractive for companies -- the big tech companies -- that run huge server installations," he says.
Badminton can see how it would be tough for those used to the old days when the oilpatch offered high-paying jobs, but he predicts that as the cost of renewables continues to go down, the world price of oil will fall correspondingly -- to the point where maybe in 10 years, it will be around $10 a barrel.
"Here's the thing: if you graduate from school and you go and you can have these well-paid jobs in the oilpatch but that disappears," Badminton says.
"You don't just assume that renewable energy's going to be the replacement for that. What you can do is actually choose to further your education to go even further.
"I actually think professions in like data analytics, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and you've even got professions in renewable engineering or whatever are good professions.
"Everyone -- including people older in age that are finding themselves without work in places like Alberta -- are going to have to retrain and we're going to have to learn what's new," he says.
Because of all that training, Badminton believes Olds College is ideally situated to do well as it provides courses for all those who need to retrain for high-tech jobs in industry or agriculture.
He applauds the Smart Farm being developed at Olds College through the $16-million Werklund gift, announced last year.
"One of the biggest businesses in the world by 2030, some of my colleagues are saying, will be an educational institution. It'll be bigger than Amazon, Facebook and all these places," Badminton says.
"So it's for that college to be progressive in what it offers to people -- around agritech, around Internet, things technology, artificial intelligence, programming, data analytics, cybersecurity and whatever. These are going to be the professions that will take people forward."
