Who pays for the wires?
Two energy stories landed in my feed today, one out of Washington and one out of Madrid, and at first glance they have nothing to do with each other.
In the U.S., the House is expected to vote on a bill meant to keep the power costs of large AI data centres off ordinary household bills. In Spain, the government raised planned investment in its transmission grid by 30%, to more than €17 billion through 2030.
The longer I sat with them, the more they looked like two halves of the same problem, and it's one Alberta is going to have to solve.
Most of our AI conversation in this province is about generation. We have natural gas, room for new plants, companies building behind-the-meter power and maybe nuclear somewhere down the road. Making the electricity is only part of the job, though. The power also has to get from where it's made to where it's used, and somebody has to pay for the lines and substations that carry it.
AESO's 2025 transmission plan noted more than 8,600 MW of proposed data centre connections submitted in 2024. More recently, the full 1,200 MW interim allocation for large loads was taken up, so connection demand has stopped being a forecast and become a queue.
Alberta is already working on what comes next: connection requirements, transmission planning, tariffs, reliability and models where large loads bring their own generation.
In the U.S., a data centre can have the engineering sorted and the economics looking good and still turn into a political fight if households and existing businesses believe they're paying for the transmission upgrades built to serve it. Spain shows the other side of the ledger, because adding generation doesn't remove the need for the network that connects it to load.
For Alberta, the questions are getting very specific. Who pays when a new 500 MW or 1 GW load needs transmission reinforcement? Where should big loads locate so they make better use of the infrastructure we already have? How much of the cost should follow the customer who created the need? And when a data centre brings its own generation but still wants a grid connection, what should it pay for the reliability the grid gives it?
Alberta already expects large data centres to pay their own connection and infrastructure costs. The harder question is what happens when the need isn't a dedicated connection, but a wider transmission reinforcement that may serve more than one customer.
I think Alberta has a real energy advantage in the AI infrastructure race. Keeping it depends on whether we can add very large loads while staying clear about which infrastructure costs belong to the project and which belong to the system. If we get that design right, transmission policy becomes part of the advantage too.
If you were writing Alberta's tariff, how much of a transmission reinforcement should be paid by the customer who triggered it, and how much belongs to the system?
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