Chiefs of the Alexander First Nation, Paul First Nation, Enoch Cree Nation, and Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation this month issued a letter addressed to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith regarding the Province’s rules around energy consumption and data centres.
As “stakeholders and potential investors in Alberta’s emerging data centre value chain,” the Nations assert in their letter that Alberta should “offer substantial power capacity to attract and support these large-scale, high-impact investments.”
However, there is concern regarding Alberta Electric System Operator’s recently revealed approach to handling large load connections, which “appears fundamentally inconsistent with Alberta’s stated policy objectives of attracting large hyper-scalers and catalyzing a data centre industry at scale.”
“Alberta’s current framework is capping our potential at the very moment we should be unleashing it,” the Chiefs lament in the letter.
Today, there are 29 proposed data centre projects representing over 16 gigawatts of demand seeking grid connections in Alberta; the Province is accused of “rationing opportunity at a time of fierce global competition.”
Regions around the world are vying for the attention of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. But under AESO’s current proposal, “not even one such flagship project may be fully realized here without years of delay.”
The letter predicts that current rules will “likely disperse [energy] capacity across many smaller initiatives, instead of fostering the significant, large-scale investments that yield substantial economic benefits and enduring value.”
This approach directly contradicts the Government of Alberta’s own Data Centre Strategy, the Chiefs argue, “which clearly articulates a vision for gigawatt-scale development.”
Alberta “should be a premier destination for hyperscale data centre investment,” according to the Nations, which envision “growth of the digital infrastructure economy as a generational opportunity to create prosperity and high-value jobs for our people.”
“The opportunity to attract large hyperscalers and build world-class AI data centres is within our grasp, but it requires bold action,” the letter concludes.
“We urge the Government of Alberta to revisit the AESO’s interim methodology and develop a strategy that supports gigawatt-scale data centre development,” the Chiefs write. “By doing so, Alberta can secure its position as a global hub for digital innovation, creating lasting prosperity for all Albertans.”
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