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Lorne Gunter: Alberta right to insist AI data-centre proposals include their own power supply

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One of the fundamental principles of the provincial government’s strategy for attracting artificial intelligence (AI) data centres to Alberta, released in 2024, is BYOP — bring your own power.

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Essentially, AI data centres are huge complexes (the size of a football field or larger) full of vast banks of computers searching through much of the world’s data and “learning” how to put it all together before pushing it out to run everything from internet searches and toasts to the bride to the design of intricate engineering projects and the operation of a space station.

They require enormous volumes of water to keep the processors cool and vast quantities of power to run all the servers that are sharing complex data back and forth.

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As AI appears to be the future of computing, the Alberta government is smart to get out in front of the demand and attract huge tech companies to build their data centres here.

That biggest problem with that strategy — and the reason the government made BYOP a requirement for new development — is that data centres consume enormous amounts of electrical power.

Each centre can use as much power as a medium to large city.

For instance, in the year after the government laid out its strategy to make Alberta the leading data-centre location in North America, if all of the 20-plus data projects initially proposed had eventually been built, together they would have consumed 10 times as much power as the city of Edmonton.

These centres would have required 16,000 megawatts of power, combined. The theoretical capacity of Alberta’s grid is 20,000 megawatts, but the most common load at peak hours is about 12,000. That means these new AI centres, had they all been built, would have used a third more power than all the rest of the province combined and would have consumed 80 per cent of the capacity of the provincial grid.

For comparison, all oilsands operations together consume about 3,300 megawatts, but most of that is co-generated by the oilsands companies themselves. That’s what’s meant by BYOP.

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So you can see why the province is so keen on data companies building their own power sources to operate their supercomputing centres. Were they to try to use the existing power grid and power sources, there wouldn’t be anywhere near enough power left for the rest of us.

However, the first few AI data centres the government has lured to our province have not had to BYOP. (Or, at least, it’s not entirely clear if two proposed centres near Edmonton are going to set up their own power generation or hook into the grid used by the rest of Albertans.)

The provincial electricity regulator, the Alberta Electricity System Operator (AESO), has warned that if BYOP is not required, the increased power usage by data centres “could put upward pressure on electricity prices” for both residential and other industrial consumers.

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Given that most of these data centres — the proposed ones and any future ones — will be owned by some of the world’s wealthiest companies, the province should be seeking to protect ordinary consumers by demanding BYOP more emphatically.

It is expected, for instance, that one of the Edmonton-area centres, while being fronted by a consortium of Alberta companies, will ultimately be used by Meta, the owners of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, Manus and Moltbook.

Enforcing BYOP may cause some companies to cancel their data centre proposals. When the AESO put a cap of 1,200 megawatts that new centres could draw from the existing grid, a number of tire-kickers backed off.

But Alberta still has much to offer — quality of life, affordable housing, relatively inexpensive industrial land, lower taxes, lighter regulation — that insisting new centres BYOP should not drive all of them away.

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