To affirm Canada’s place in tech, in this case, artificial intelligence (AI), the federal government has announced new investments into Alberta’s AI ecosystem, which should reflect positively on your electric bill.
Through their AI cluster, Scale Ai, the Canadian Government is supporting an applied AI initiative led by Calgary startup Arcus Power. With a total project value of $3 million, the project is said to illustrate how organizations in the province are adopting advanced AI technologies to strengthen competitiveness, accelerate innovation and contribute to Canada’s economic growth.
“This project will enable battery operators to optimize charging and discharging based on real-time market signals, grid requirements, and asset health—boosting revenue, reducing wear, and improving overall system performance,” a Scale AI-issued release reads.
MP for Calgary Confederation, Corey Hogan, said that Canadians should think bigger then homework-helping chat bots when imagining AI, considering instead its ability to optimize large-scale systems and workflows.
“When we talk about AI, I think people very quickly go to large language models; they think about the stories they read about the various data centers. Certainly, data centers are essential, but I think what today’s announcement underlines, and the project we’re talking about underlines, is that the use cases for AI are very strong, and they create very good economic benefits to people who are paying electricity bills,” he said.
“When you have distributed electricity like this, you don’t need to build out as much. You don’t build out as much, those charges don’t go to the bills. By finding those smart optimizations in a way that AI unlocks, we unlock economic opportunity, we unlock savings, we unlock affordability for Canadians.”
Canadian leadership cannot stand by and watch AI develop and integrate itself worldwide, Hogan said, they themselves must adopt it effectively, where it fits.
“This is what nation-building looks like. When we used to connect the country, we used to think of railways with steam locomotives bringing us together from east and west. Well, today it’s AI and digital systems that write the next great chapter of this country,” he said.
“Make no mistake, Canada helped invent modern AI, and it’s something I don’t think we talk enough about.”
Hogan noted that Canada launched the world’s first national AI strategy in 2017 and that there are more than 3,300 AI companies across the country.
“AI is helping us turn that advantage into real-world results, taking AI out of the lab and into the heart of Canadian industry,” he said.
“This is Canadian innovation, solving Canadian challenges and then taking those solutions to the rest of the world.”
Increased professional AI use will not strap energy grids: Experts
Even accounting for increased grid consumption coming from AI use, President of the Board for Decentralized Energy Canada, John Rilet, said that a lot has improved since Calgary’s early 2024 and 2025 grid use scares.
“The amount of new generation that has come online since then actually leaves us in a position where we have an adequate surplus today. In fact, if you look at the last few days, power prices are very low because wind is producing and we have that extra in there,” he said.
The potential use of AI management may actually optimize our energy grid, not strap it, Riley said.
“(The AI use) is basically to get more out of what we have, to use it more efficiently, more effectively and avoid those sort of edge conditions where we might be going out, that’s actually the core of this,” he said.
“It’s not so much a cost of what this is or how much power this is using, it’s how this helps the energy grid dispatch things more effectively and in essence, avoid that kind of crunch that we had last January.”
Rhonda Jewett, Arcus Power’s VP of Growth and Operations, agreed that energy prices have gone down in recent months and should only continue with AI-based optimization.
“On your bill, you have demand charges and you have energy charges. In fact, with the increased supply, our energy prices have decreased substantially over the last year because of increased supply. By accessing the new generation, we’re not having to build extra infrastructure to facilitate these transmission lines,” she said.
“The bottom line is, by leveraging these technologies to be more efficient with the use of the assets that we have, we are reducing costs for everyone, and you’ll see it come through in our fixed costs.”
