Alberta’s AI data centre boom unleashes ‘gold rush’ for electricity allotments

Last year, as AI data centre proponents competed for a portion of the limited 1,200 megawatts that would connect their projects to the provincial grid, one company secured 180 megawatts from the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) — then sold it to a buyer for $18 million.

Industry experts say it’s a result of the rapid push to build out AI data centres and power those energy-hungry facilities, with immense demand sparking a "gold rush" for electricity connections.

In November, Kalina Distributed Power, a Canadian subsidiary of Australian power company Kalina Power Ltd., announced it sold and transferred its 180-megawatt allocation to Greenlight Electricity Centre Limited “and its customer (a global data center developer and user).”

Greenlight is a joint venture between Pembina Pipeline and Kineticor planned for development northeast of Edmonton. Once complete, it will ultimately provide around 1,800 megawatts of power capacity.

Just days after the $18 million sale and megawatt transfer was completed, AESO announced it had allocated the 1,200 megawatts to two projects, one of which was allotted 970 megawatts — a project from Pembina Pipeline that could become a massive Meta AI data centre, according to The Logic.

Pung Toy, CEO and co-founder of Power Grid Specialists Corp., said in this new era of AI demand there’s a “gold rush” for electricity allotments to build out more data centres, leading to a unique sale such as this one.

“It's unprecedented in any space, but since transmission capacity seems to be a commodity now — before it never used to be,” said Toy, who has helped oil and gas companies connect to the grid in his decades-long career. Now, he’s also working with AI data centre developers.

“The majority of the time when oil and gas companies [wanted] to connect, there was never a rush. You file your application with the AESO, you go through the studies and whatever they needed … if the study shows no concerns, they were granted that interconnection,” he said.

The demand for connection to the grid now is unprecedented. Currently, there are 42 large-load projects in AESO’s queue, requesting a total load of 21.1 gigawatts from the grid. 

For comparison, that’s nearly twice as much as the province’s entire power load during peak hours, or 15 times the electricity it takes to power Edmonton.

“I understand why the AESO is going through this allotment phase just to make sure the system doesn't get overwhelmed. Normally oil and gas developments take a period of time. There's not really a gold rush because these types of infrastructure [are] you know, $1-billion, $2-billion-type decisions, so they go through very, very methodically,” Toy explained.

“Whereas the AI centre space you can plug in a data centre within three years, it doesn't take much to install these types of facilities.”

Developers that had already qualified for Phase 1 of AESO’s program were allowed to transfer their allotments amongst each other between June 30, 2025 and July 7, 2025. 

In that period, Kalina reported it received 180 megawatts for its large load projects, representing 15 per cent of the total 1,200 megawatts up for grabs. In its quarterly report, Kalina said its allotment was “disproportionately larger than others because its applications for load were integrated with applications for generation as well.”