Alberta data-centre projects publish megawatt figures that measure completely different things.
Getting this straight is the difference between understanding the debate and being fooled by it.
MW
How fast the computers are drawing electricity, right now.
Think of it asHow hard the tap is running.
The one worked example you need
A 1,000 MW site running flat out for one hour uses 1,000 MWh. Running all
year it uses about 8,760,000 MWh. Every MW figure on this website is a rate,
not a total.
Annual electricity consumption for Alberta projects: not publicly disclosed
Five metric types, and what each one means
Data-centre load
Electricity the computers actually pull. This is the demand.
Generation capacity
The most a power plant can produce. This is the supply.
Grid allocation
Permission to draw from the shared grid. This is a queue position.
Headline facility scale
The number in the press release. Design ambition, not measurement.
Backup generation
Only runs in an emergency. Almost never producing.
The same unit, four different meanings
Meta's campus alone publishes four megawatt figures. They are not alternative estimates of one
quantity. They are four different quantities.
Headline facility scale
1 GW
A headline "1 gigawatt facility" describes the scale the campus is designed toward. It is not a measured load, and it is not the same as the grid allocation below.
Grid allocation
970 MW
A grid allocation is permission to draw up to this much from the Alberta grid. It is not a generator, and it is not a measurement of what the site will actually consume.
Generation capacity
932 MW
This is a SEPARATE adjacent natural-gas project (Pembina / Kineticor), reported at ~$4.6B and expected in service in the second half of 2030 — after the data centre is running. Generation capacity is what a plant can produce; it is not the data centre’s load.
Generation capacity
250 MW
A contract for electricity available in the second half of 2028. A supply agreement is a commercial arrangement, not a fourth power plant to be added to the others.
Headline facility scale
~1.8 GW
A possible eventual campus scale, well beyond the announced first phase. Treat as an upper bound under discussion, not a commitment.
Data-centre load
~1,400 MW
AESO offers this as a size comparison only. It does not mean any single project "uses more power than Edmonton" — compare the bars, and read what each bar measures.
How the electricity actually arrives
Alberta grid→Transmission→Substation→Campus
The site draws from the shared provincial grid like any other large customer. Everyone else on the grid is affected by the size of that draw, which is why AESO has a queue and an interim limit.
The clean-energy matching architecture is the one most often misread. Contractual annual
matching and real-time physical supply are two separate layers, and a company can be completely
honest about the first while the second looks nothing like it.