This is reference material rather than news. It is revised as things change, and the review date above is when it was last checked against its sources.
Coverage of Alberta’s data centre buildout is dense with terminology, and several of the terms are used loosely in ways that obscure exactly the distinctions a reader needs. This is a reference for the vocabulary, organised roughly in the order a project encounters it.
An interconnection queue is the ordered list of parties waiting to connect to the transmission system. Because the grid can only absorb so much new load, applicants wait, and their position in that queue is a real asset. Alberta’s queue for data centre load reached roughly 19,565 MW of requests against a first tranche release of 1,200 MW, a ratio of more than fifteen to one. When a project is described as having secured grid access, the meaningful question is whether it holds a queue position or merely an application.
Firm Demand Transmission Service, usually shortened to firm DTS, is the service class that guarantees a customer can draw its contracted load. It is what a data centre needs, because a facility that can be curtailed is a facility whose compute contracts cannot be honoured. Interruptible service is cheaper and available sooner, and some projects are exploring it for workloads that tolerate curtailment, but the two are not equivalent and reporting sometimes conflates them.
Bring-your-own-generation is the shorthand for Alberta’s Data Centre Regulation, in force since June 2026, which directs the AESO to prioritise projects pairing their demand with dedicated new generation or storage. In practice it covers several quite different arrangements: a genuinely islanded facility with on-site generation, a project contracting new generation elsewhere on the system so its net effect is close to neutral, or a hybrid using on-site gas for part of the load with grid supply and storage covering the rest.
An anchor tenant is the customer that has committed to buying a substantial share of the facility’s compute. Its presence is the strongest available signal that a project is real, because it means a counterparty has underwritten the demand. A data centre without one is a building proposal, and buildings of this cost are not financed on enthusiasm. The absence of a named anchor tenant in an announcement is informative.
Colocation describes a facility that rents space, power and cooling to multiple customers who bring their own equipment. It differs from a hyperscale facility built and operated by a single company for its own workloads. The distinction matters for Alberta because the bring-your-own-generation requirement is easier for a hyperscaler to satisfy: it can absorb the cost and delay of arranging dedicated generation in a way a mid-sized colocation provider frequently cannot.
Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, is total facility energy divided by the energy reaching the computing equipment. A PUE of 1.0 would mean every joule went to compute, which is impossible; modern efficient facilities operate somewhere around 1.1 to 1.2, while older ones ran considerably higher. Alberta’s climate helps here, because cold outside air can be used for cooling for much of the year, reducing the energy overhead substantially.
Water Usage Effectiveness is the equivalent measure for water, and it matters more in Alberta than the compute industry usually acknowledges. Evaporative cooling is efficient in energy terms and consumes water, and Alberta’s river systems are already heavily allocated. Closed-loop and air-cooled designs use far less water and more electricity, which is a real engineering trade-off rather than a marketing choice. Water licensing is a separate process from grid interconnection, so a project can hold a queue position and still be waiting on water.
Megawatts of IT load is the honest measure of a data centre’s size, and it is what should be compared between projects. Announced capital value should not be, because it typically represents everything a site could eventually host if fully built over decades and is underwritten by nobody at the time it is published. Megawatts granted by the system operator cannot be inflated in the same way.
Curtailment is the reduction of a facility’s draw when the system is stressed. Some emerging data centre designs accept curtailment for interruptible workloads such as model training, which can pause, as opposed to inference serving live users, which cannot. This is one of the more genuinely interesting technical directions in the field, because it changes what kind of grid connection a facility needs.
Behind-the-meter generation is supply connected directly to the load rather than to the public grid. It avoids some transmission charges and some interconnection delay, and it raises questions about whether the facility is contributing to the system costs it benefits from. Front-of-meter generation connects to the grid normally and is dispatched through the market.
Stranded asset risk is the possibility that infrastructure built for a specific customer becomes uneconomic if that customer leaves or fails. It applies with force to transmission built to serve a single data centre, which is a long-lived asset serving a customer whose industry is barely a decade old in its current form. Who carries that risk, the developer or the rate base, is the cost allocation question in its sharpest form.
Reading any Alberta data centre announcement with these distinctions in hand produces a short and useful checklist. Does the project hold an interconnection position or an application. Is the generation contracted or described. Is there a named anchor tenant. Has a water licence been secured where the design requires one. And is the headline number megawatts granted, or dollars announced. Projects that answer the first four are real. Projects offering only the fifth are proposals with a large number attached.