Data centres top big power requests in this Ontario city, placing pressure on local utility

Hydro Ottawa’s CEO says the utility is under “extraordinary pressures” as energy-hungry data centres lead a historic surge in large-scale customers seeking to connect to the power grid.

Bryce Conrad says he expects by the end of the year total grid connection requests from large-scale projects in Ottawa will exceed the average power use of the entire city’s homes and businesses.

As it stands, he says 34 large projects in the connection queue have cumulative demands equivalent to about 86 per cent of the utility’s average load, or just over 1,000 MW.

About 60 per cent of that comes from data centres, the infrastructure backbone of the artificial intelligence boom.

Public institution projects, such as hospitals and government, are the next biggest slice of connection requests at 17 per cent.

Conrad says most projects want to connect in the next two years, pushing the company to move at a pace and scale that “we have never experienced before.”

“We are currently managing the largest volume in our history of requests for grid connection from what we call large load customers,” he told city council at Wednesday’s meeting.

“We are being asked to build … in the next two to three years, what has taken us the better part of 110 years to build. And to be clear, that growth is not expected to slow any time soon.”

The figures reflect a broader shift in electricity demand, fuelled by investments in new data centres lined with energy-hungry computer servers powering the growth in artificial intelligence technologies.

Data centre projects with cumulative demands of about 6,000 MW are requesting to connect to Ontario’s grid, the Independent Electricity System Operator said last month. That was up by 70 per cent from just two months earlier, said the IESO, the Crown corporation charged with managing the province’s power grid and overseeing the wholesale electricity market.

Most of those projects are in very early stages and figures can fluctuate significantly as projects withdraw, pause or advance, the IESO says.