Varcoe: 'Mind-blowing' — Huge gigawatt-scale data centre projects join Alberta's power lineup
In May, the Alberta Electric System Operator tracked several proposed data centres that wanted to connect to the province’s transmission system.
If built, they’d need about 2,000 megawatts of electricity.
By October, a handful of major projects joined the grid operator’s connection queue, including three of 500 MW or more.
According to industry experts, it pushes the total to more than 5,000 MW of load in AESO’s application line-up — highlighting a surge of interest in such initiatives in Alberta.
“We have two projects in the AESO connection queue for a total of 1.5 gigawatts of load” for potential data centres to be co-located at the Genesee Generating Station in Alberta, Capital Power CEO Avik Dey told an earnings call on Wednesday.
“We are seeing real interest in Alberta and we’re looking forward to continue to advance that, which is why we’ve proceeded on our own path for site preparation at Genesee.”
Earlier this week, some of the anticipated promise of data centres in Alberta turned into reality.
Montreal-based eStruxture Data Centers unveiled plans Tuesday to build a new $750-million AI-focused facility north of Calgary in Rocky View County. The facility will draw 90 megawatts (MW) of power from the provincial grid.
Construction is expected to be completed in 2026. Companies are eyeing Alberta for several reasons, including the availability of electricity, land and fibre-optic links.
Alberta also has the only deregulated electricity market in the country, which allows data centre operators to negotiate power purchase agreements with generators.
“We have in excess of 50 projects like this currently in the pipeline, and some of them are significant in size,” said Rick Christiaanse, CEO of Invest Alberta, which seeks to attract investment into the province.
“There are some projects out there that are just mind-blowing, in terms of the opportunities and in terms of the size and scope.”
Some projects being discussed combine data centres with new power generation, which could potentially sell any excess electricity into the grid, he added.
A report this month by the International Energy Agency says there are more than 11,000 data centres worldwide and their location is driven by proximity to infrastructure such as fibre optic cables, available electricity, customers and workers.
Decisions on where to build are also being impacted by incentives, regulations and climate, as cold weather leads to lower cooling needs for such facilities, it stated.
Alberta is home to 22 data centres, including 12 in Calgary and nine in Edmonton.
With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), which has large power requirements, and the expansion of cloud computing, industry experts anticipate more announcements are coming.
“I’m aware of approximately 20 gigawatts of data centre interest in Alberta,” Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf said earlier this month.
“I do not believe that we will attract all of that, nor necessarily should we.”
Earlier this year, the province set up a cabinet committee to streamline the approval process and attract such investment, saying it would create jobs and demand for natural gas — although many customers are seeking clean energy or long-term decarbonization plans.
Creating additional load in Alberta also means more customers would spread out the fixed costs of transmission and distribution on a larger base.
“It’s very reasonable and realistic that Alberta could attract up to $100 billion in data centre and related infrastructure investment over the next five years,” Technology Minister Nate Glubish said in an interview Tuesday.
The province is working on a formal policy for the province to support data centre investment, to ensure there’s an efficient approval process in place.
After a period of tight supplies last winter and this spring, marked by several grid alerts, the province is shifting into a period of surplus power with the recent, and imminent, addition of gas-fired generating units and renewable projects.
The province wants to attract data centres, but Glubish is encouraging developers to have their own off-grid infrastructure, which would speed up the approval process.
“We welcome this investment, and we want Alberta to be a destination of choice, but you’ve got to bring your own power,” he added.
“We will never make a decision related to data centre investment attraction that would ever destabilize our electricity grid.”
On the latest AESO preliminary connection list, one project in the Fort Saskatchewan area is listed as having 1,800 MW of load.
Two other major proposals are also in the lineup listed as the Genesee Data Centre — one for 1,000 MW of power, and another for 500 MW.
The Genesee Generating Station, located west of Edmonton, is owned and operated by Capital Power.
“While our discussions have not yet given rise to an announcement, our confidence level in playing a leadership role, providing power to the build-out of data centres in the U.S. and Canada, is rising,” Dey said.
“We’re in active conversations with large players, whether it be hyper-scalers directly or major data centre providers, who are now looking to this market for places to place hyper-data centres or larger data centres.”
At Genesee, three generating units were previously powered by coal, but two are being converted to combined-cycle gas turbines, adding 512 additional MW of net capacity to the facility.
(A third unit at Genesee was converted from coal to gas in 2023.)
While land can be a hurdle for some data centres, company senior vice-president Jason Comandante noted the Genesee site is located on 25,000 acres of property.
“We are in the exploration, investigation, development phase,” Comandante said in an interview.
“The opportunity for us there is to sell power to the data centre that we could potentially look to have sited at Genesee through these (Demand Transmission Service) requests” to AESO’s connection queue.
The transmission request doesn’t mean the company is moving forward with a project, but is a step to facilitate the development of potential data centres at Genesee.
The AESO points out that future demand growth expected from new data centres is uncertain. Many requests are in the early stages.
“It does take some really detailed studies for us to ensure that we understand the impact on the transmission system,” Robert Davidson, AESO vice-president of grid reliability transmission, said Tuesday.
“These data centres can be the size of small towns to large cities, and so we do have to be very thoughtful in how we integrate them in.”
Chris Varcoe
Calgary Herald
