Power & the grid
The binding constraint is not money. It is power.
The province can connect a sliver of what has been requested. Everything past that line is waiting on power it does not yet have.
Capacity & queue: AESO. Peak for scale: Bennett Jones. The queue moves, so we date it.
The grid can take 1,200 MW of new large load, and it is fully allocated.
The interim limit is 1,200 MW through 2028, and the tracker shows all of it going to two Edmonton-area projects, 970 MW and 230 MW.2
The queue is more than ten times what the grid can give.
Roughly 16–21 GW is requested across ~29–40 projects. The grid operator’s own CEO has said the system cannot connect them all.4
Water
There is no single province-wide answer
Most alarming water figures online describe specific facilities on other continents and then get repeated as if they apply here. We want the Alberta projects’ numbers, specifically.
The concern
- Large facilities can draw heavily on water for cooling, in a semi-arid province, during drought.
- On-site gas generation adds noise and emissions neighbours have raised at town halls.11
- “It uses a lot of water” is easy to say and hard to source for a specific Alberta build.
The other side
- A closed-loop or air-cooled build is a different animal from the scary evaporative case studies.
- Some projects plan dedicated generation that does not draw on the public grid at all.
- Which applies depends entirely on the project, which is exactly why one number for the province does not exist.
We are still gathering the Alberta-specific figures. Follow the open questions on Explainers, and see every source on Citations.