Pembina Pipeline Corp., along with Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management, have approved the construction of the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a natural gas facility designed to cater to a data center client. The anticipated project cost is $4.6 billion, with plans for a 932-megawatt plant in Sturgeon County, located in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland region to the north of Edmonton. The target for commencement is set for the latter half of 2030, with provisions in place for potential future capacity expansion.
Data centers play a crucial role in housing the necessary computer infrastructure to support a variety of technological applications, with their significance growing alongside advancements in artificial intelligence and cloud computing. While the specific identity of the data center customer has not been disclosed by the involved parties, Alberta has actively been seeking to attract major hyperscale developers like Meta and Google to establish operations within the province. Due to limitations in the current electricity grid’s capacity to accommodate numerous large projects, Alberta is prioritizing initiatives where companies generate or secure their own power supply.
Premier Danielle Smith highlighted the Greenlight Electricity Centre as a prime illustration of this strategy, emphasizing the benefits of data centers contributing to their power generation and infrastructure costs. Smith also credited a recent comprehensive energy agreement between the federal government and Alberta for enabling such investments by suspending certain clean electricity regulations that were perceived as potentially detrimental to the natural gas-dependent grid’s cost and reliability.
Scott Burrows, CEO of Pembina, praised Alberta’s conducive environment for projects like Greenlight to progress, attributing the province’s focus on competitiveness, investment attraction, and energy development as key factors in positioning Alberta as an appealing hub for significant industries and sustained growth. Despite concerns raised in other regions about environmental impact and noise associated with data center projects involving gas plants, Smith reassured that the Greenlight facility’s location has a history of accommodating industrial development without significant residential proximity.
In contrast, the Pembina Institute, an independent clean-energy think tank unrelated to the energy sector, expressed disappointment in the Greenlight Energy Centre’s reliance on gas-fired power instead of exploring more cost-effective renewable energy alternatives as gas power costs escalate. The institute highlighted the rigidity of Alberta’s current regulations favoring gas-fired generation for data centers, noting the potential benefits of incorporating a mix of energy sources to mitigate environmental consequences and expenses associated with gas power.