Scotia Place arena details revealed as development permit approved

The development permit for Calgary's new event centre was approved and new details about the forthcoming Scotia Place were revealed Thursday.

It's likely the last major hurdle that needed to be cleared to build the $920-million event centre and new home of the Calgary Flames.

The new details shown to the Calgary Planning Commission on Thursday included new renderings of how the building will look.

Members of the commission voted unanimously to approve the permit for Scotia Place, which will seat 18,400 people for hockey games and sporting events and 20,000 for concerts. It will be built in Calgary's Victoria Park neighbourhood.

The new arena will be owned by the City of Calgary and operated by the Calgary Sports and Entertainment Corporation (CSEC), which owns the NHL's Calgary Flames and other sports properties.

Excavation work is already underway at the arena site. The building will be ready for the hockey season in fall 2027.

The building will be equipped with 600 solar panels that will generate on-site power and will be connected to the District Energy Centre on Ninth Avenue S.E., the city says. The venue is designed to be fully electrified and net-zero by 2050.

Susie Darrington, Scotia Place project committee member and vice-president of building operations at CSEC, told reporters the new building will be a significant leap forward from its predecessor, the Saddledome. She says Scotia Place was designed to be flexible, so it can be configured differently in the future as market demands change. 

"One of the biggest challenges with the Saddledome is just being able to move around it. We'll be a fully accessible building from the street level. And then we also will provide elevators and escalators to move within the building," Darrington said.

She added the new building's roof will be able to sustain 400,000 tons, a large improvement from the Saddledome roof, which has a 90,000-ton limit.

Darrington says such features will make Scotia Place attractive for large concerts.

Scotia Place will have 20 per cent more bathrooms than Rogers Place in Edmonton and 60 per cent more than the building code requires for an arena of its size. Darrington says a third of the restrooms will be able to accommodate all people, regardless of gender, because some events will have a larger female demographic in attendance, while others will have more of a male audience.

"That gives us a really great opportunity to change the bathrooms back and forth depending on how we want to customize that event for the fans coming," she said.

The design team consulted with Indigenous communities and looked at five major arenas in North America when planning Scotia Place. Those included Rogers Place in Edmonton, Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, Minn., T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas and Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio.