The Meter's Running
Ottawa's data centre boom is about to push electricity demand past a century of growth in three years. Here's what that means for your bill, your grid, and what your councillor has actually said about it.
"All anxiety tranquilized, all boredom amused." — Arthur Jensen, Network (1976), written by Paddy Chayefsky
Every home and business in Ottawa currently draws about 30,000 megawatt-hours of power a day from Hydro Ottawa. Waiting in the utility's connection queue right now are 34 large-load projects that, combined, want another 25,800 MWh a day — enough to very nearly double the city's total draw. Roughly 60 per cent of that request comes from data centres; another 17 per cent comes from public institutions like hospitals and government facilities.13
None of the 34 projects have been named publicly. Hydro Ottawa's CEO, Bryce Conrad, told council in June that the requestors are not major hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, or Meta — they're smaller companies, some in generative AI, alongside government customers seeking capacity for national defence.3 Ottawa residents are being asked to underwrite grid capacity for entities the utility itself won't identify.
Who pays to build this out
Conrad told council the utility is being asked to build, in two to three years, roughly what took the better part of 110 years to develop.3 Transformer procurement — once a six-to-nine-month wait — now runs two to four years.4 Hydro Ottawa says it will need to roughly double its capital investment over the next five years just to keep pace, and has gone from energizing one new substation every five years to about one a year.45
That buildout shows up on residential bills. Hydro Ottawa's original five-year rate application sought a 16 per cent distribution increase for 2026 alone — $6.08 a month — with further increases through 2030 explicitly framed as funding grid expansion to meet demand growth.6 The Ontario Energy Board rejected the full plan on affordability grounds and capped 2026 at $5.87 a month, plus a retroactive catch-up charge through May 2027.6 Hydro Ottawa must now reapply annually for 2027 through 2030 — so the rest of that request is still on the table.6
This sits on top of province-wide pressure: Ontario's Regulated Price Plan rates rose roughly 29 to 30 per cent on November 1, 2025 — the largest jump since 2019 — with a further structural change on May 1, 2026 that raised effective daytime costs for most households.8 Nowhere in the public record does Hydro Ottawa specify what share of the data centre queue's own connection costs will be recovered from those customers directly, versus spread across everyone's bill — a cost-allocation question other jurisdictions are already confronting. Hydro-Québec, for comparison, is moving to charge large data centres roughly double its standard large-customer rate.9
Can the grid actually keep up?
Short term, provincially, yes: the Independent Electricity System Operator rates Ontario's supply adequate through mid-2027.11 That's a province-wide generation forecast, though — a different question from Hydro Ottawa's local distribution bottleneck, where the transformer lead times above are the real constraint. The practical risk to Ward 13 in the near term isn't a province-wide blackout; it's localized reliability strain in areas where substations are pushed past capacity while upgrades queue up.5
Longer term, the picture is less comfortable. IESO's 2026 Annual Planning Outlook names data centres as a structural demand driver — expected to account for 13 per cent of Ontario's new electricity demand by 2035 — and projects unserved energy beginning around 2031, climbing toward 19 TWh a year by 2035 and roughly 95 TWh a year by 2044 without additional procurement.10 IESO has also drafted new technical requirements specifically for large computational loads, formally recognizing data centres as a distinct reliability-risk category.12
A tale of two statements
Both of the following are Bryce Conrad, speaking on the same day.
June 24, 2026 — to City Council"Extraordinary pressure" from a historic surge in large-scale connection requests — the highest volume in the company's history.3
June 24, 2026 — Annual General Meeting releaseHydro Ottawa is "fully prepared to meet the rising energy demands" of the city, with "confidence and resolve."5
By August 13, in an interview about the request queue, Conrad's language had shifted again — describing the pace of new data centre requests as having "stabilized."13 Six weeks is a fast turnaround for a structural grid problem involving multi-year transformer lead times. What's most likely stabilized is the rate of new requests arriving — not the underlying capacity gap those requests already created.
Priorities, in public view
Ottawa households are the ones absorbing these increases. It's a fair test of a councillor's priorities to look at what actually shows up across their communications channels. Councillor King's office promoted Capital Pride in both his newsletter and his website in each of the last two years, and he was photographed at Sunday's parade. Across the same period, I could find no newsletter item, public statement, or social post from him addressing the Hydro Ottawa rate case, the 1,075-megawatt data centre connection queue, or how those costs should be allocated between ratepayers and the companies driving the demand14 — despite sitting on both the Finance and Corporate Services Committee and the Environment and Climate Change Committee, the two bodies most directly positioned to act on it.15
Residents footing the bill increases have not heard from him on the file.
References
- Yahoo News Canada / The Canadian Press, "Data centres top Ottawa's big power requests, placing pressure on local utility," June 25, 2026. ca.news.yahoo.com
- CBC News (Arthur White-Crummey), "Data centres hungry for power putting 'extraordinary pressure' on Hydro Ottawa," June 24, 2026. cbc.ca
- Let's Data Science, "Data centres drive Ottawa's major power requests," citing CBC News, June 26, 2026. letsdatascience.com
- Hydro Ottawa Group, "Past progress, future powered: Hydro Ottawa highlights record 2025 investments and launches 2026-2030 Strategic Direction," AGM press release, June 24, 2026. newswire.ca
- CBC News (Nathan Fung), "Hydro Ottawa can't raise electricity rates by $6 a month, regulator rules," May 14, 2026. cbc.ca
- CBC News, "Hydro Ottawa's rates to rise, but energy board rejected larger increase," June 15, 2026. cbc.ca
- ImmigrationNewsCanada, "Ontario Hydro Summer Rate Changes Effective May 1," April 18, 2026. immigrationnewscanada.ca
- Canada's National Observer, "Hydro-Québec proposes doubling electricity rates for energy-hungry data centres," February 19, 2026. nationalobserver.com
- IESO, 2026 Annual Planning Outlook: Ontario's Electricity System Needs 2027–2050, March 2026. ieso.ca
- IESO, "Reliability Outlook: New Energy Storage to Keep Ontario System Prepared for Summer 2026," June 18, 2026. ieso.ca
- BLG, "Data centre regulation in Ontario: Grid access rules," July 8, 2026. blg.com
- CTV News Ottawa, "'It's stabilized now': Ottawa Hydro CEO says data centre requests level out," August 13, 2026. ctvnews.ca
- Councillor Rawlson King, ward newsletter and website, Capital Pride announcements, August 2025 and August 2026. rideau-rockcliffe.ca
- Councillor Rawlson King, official biography, City of Ottawa. ottawa.ca
No comments:
Post a Comment