TL;DR

  • Queue Totals Reflect Intent, Not Delivery: Alberta’s interconnection queue has reached 19,565 megawatts, measuring speculative demand rather than actual capacity being built
  • Grid Allocations Are Strictly Constrained: Initial connection allocations are fully committed, leaving developers without existing approvals unable to obtain credible energization dates while permanent frameworks are finalized
  • Priority Favors “Bring-Your-Own-Generation”: Under Alberta’s Data Centre Regulation, queue priority is granted to projects that pair data loads with new dedicated generation or storage
  • Behind-the-Meter Power Bypasses Queue Delays: Co-located, off-grid self-supply under AUC Rule 007 avoids interconnection requests entirely, trading unmanageable queue delays for manageable execution risks

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By Jolie Kahn, Chief Executive Officer and Director, FingerMotion, Inc.

Alberta has become the most quoted jurisdiction in North American data center development, and the figure doing most of that quoting is the interconnection queue. As of July 30, 2026, the Alberta Electric System Operator reported approximately 19,565 megawatts of requested data centre load awaiting connection. The number is generally presented as evidence of a boom.

It is worth setting that figure beside another one. Alberta’s all-time peak demand — every home, business and industrial facility in the province, drawing at once — is roughly 12,800 megawatts. The queue is more than one and a half times everything Alberta has ever consumed at a single moment.

A number that large is not a forecast of supply. It is a measure of how many parties want the same scarce thing.

A Queue Measures Demand, Not Delivery

Entering an interconnection queue is inexpensive relative to building anything. A queue position commits no one to construction, no one to an offtake agreement and no one to a capital plan. It is closer to an option than a project.

This matters because queue totals are increasingly cited as though they describe capacity that is on its way. They do not. They describe intent, and intent in a constrained market is abundant. Operators evaluating where to site workloads over the next three years are better served by asking a narrower question: how much capacity in this jurisdiction is permitted, and how much is actually energized.

The First Allocation Is Already Spent

Alberta’s answer to the volume of requests was to limit them. Phase 1 of the AESO’s approach permitted 1,200 megawatts of new data centre connections, and that allocation is now fully committed. Phase 2, the permanent framework, is still being finalized. An interim bridging approach allows limited additional load under strict conditions, capped system-wide at 1,600 megawatts, limited to three years per project, and requiring that data centres reduce demand first when the grid is stressed.

The practical consequence is straightforward. A developer without an existing allocation cannot presently provide a credible grid energization date. Not a pessimistic one — none at all, because the framework that would produce it is not yet final.

The Queue Sorts By Who Brings Power

Alberta’s Data Centre Regulation, effective June 2026, formalized the tiebreaker: projects that bring dedicated new generation or storage are prioritized in the connection queue. The province’s bring-your-own-generation framework asks a developer to pair new generation with the load it intends to draw. Meta’s Sturgeon County campus is the widely cited example, combining a grid connection with a multi-billion-dollar private generating station.

This reframes the planning problem. The binding constraint on AI infrastructure in a jurisdiction like Alberta is not land, and it is not hardware. It is permitted power. Capital and equipment can be procured on commercial timelines. A connection cannot be procured at all when the allocation is closed.

Below The Threshold, A Different Path Exists

There is a second route, and it is less discussed because it does not appear in queue statistics at all.

Alberta Utilities Commission Rule 007 governs facility applications for power plants, substations, transmission lines and industrial system designations. Smaller individual power plants fall into a lighter review than large facilities. An Industrial System Designation permits co-located generation and load to be treated as a single industrial system for self-supply purposes, so that internal wiring is not regulated as transmission.

A facility developed this way generates and consumes power on site. It makes no interconnection request, holds no queue position and requires no transmission service arrangement. Because each application is comparatively small, several sites may be permitted in parallel over a period measured in months rather than in the years an interconnection can require.

That is a meaningful difference in a market where the grid path currently offers no date at all.

The Trade Is Real

Behind-the-meter generation is not a shortcut, and it should not be described as one.

Generation capital that the utility would otherwise carry moves onto the developer’s balance sheet. Fuel supply must be contracted rather than assumed. Reliability becomes an operating responsibility rather than a purchased service, and a site without a grid connection has no system to lean on during an outage. Permitting itself is not guaranteed; municipal processes, landowner agreements and regulatory review all consume time, and timelines slip.

The honest characterization is that this path trades one set of risks for another. It substitutes execution risk, which a capable operator can manage, for queue risk, which no operator can manage at all.

What To Ask Instead

The industry would be better served by reporting Alberta’s numbers in four categories rather than one: requested, allocated, permitted and in service. Those are very different quantities, and at present only the first is widely quoted.

For anyone sitting capacity in a constrained jurisdiction, the more useful question is not how large the queue has grown. It is whether a given project needs the queue at all.

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About the Author

Jolie Kahn is Chief Executive Officer and Director of FingerMotion, Inc. (Nasdaq: FNGR). She has been a public-company CEO, CFO and corporate finance attorney for more than three decades, with over $5 billion in capital raises and experience spanning data centers, power, capital markets, fintech and high-growth technology. She previously served as Principal Outside Counsel and General Counsel to a major Bitcoin mining company, overseeing SEC compliance, governance, financings and regulatory matters. She holds a BA from Cornell University and a J.D. magna cum laude from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Jolie Kahn has also written on modular data center economics for the Forbes Business Council.