$13 billion is landing in a county that never pitched for it. Sturgeon County did not apply to host the biggest data centre project in Canadian history. It just happened to be zoned right.
A Project Bigger Than The Zoning That Allowed It
Meta is spending $13 billion on its first Canadian data centre, going up in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland roughly 40 kilometres northeast of Edmonton. The facility alone will need close to a gigawatt of power to run. Meta puts the pitch at more than 300 permanent jobs and up to 3,000 workers at peak construction.
Hundreds of Albertans have already shown up to ask what that means for them. A town hall in Lacombe filled up, then a second one in Redwater, in northern Sturgeon County, three days later on August 20. Two more are already booked, a virtual session with the premier and an in-person stop in Grande Prairie, before any of this is fully settled.
The Power Behind The Pledge
Meta has pledged to match 100% of the facility’s electricity use with renewable or clean energy and to run a closed-loop, liquid-cooled system with no operational water use for cooling. Both commitments are real and worth crediting. But the power actually reaching the site is coming from a separate natural gas plant, the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a $4.6 billion project backed by Pembina Pipeline, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management, targeting an initial 932 megawatts with room to expand toward 1.8 gigawatts by late 2030.
Meta’s clean energy claim is satisfied through renewable energy certificates, an accounting mechanism that credits renewable generation happening elsewhere on the grid rather than electrons flowing directly from a wind farm to the data centre. That is a standard industry practice, not a scandal. But it means the physical power behind Alberta’s biggest AI project is gas today, with renewables promised for later, and residents living near a gas plant built specifically to feed a hyperscale campus deserve to know that plainly rather than read it off a sustainability page.
What Rural Alberta Is Actually Asking For
This is Alberta building the kind of infrastructure Ottawa cannot get out of the review stage for a single pipeline. That is worth something on its own. But a project this size only earns its welcome if the people living next to it get straight answers instead of a ribbon-cutting photo, a point the province has effectively conceded by booking a full run of town halls rather than one.
The questions residents keep raising are not complicated. What happens to local water supplies once the gas plant and data centre are both running at full capacity. Who ends up covering the cost if the new generation capacity pushes power prices up for everyone else on the grid. And what does a community actually get, beyond a temporary construction payroll, for hosting a project of this scale permanently.
Trust is not optional when the ask is this big. It gets built one honest answer at a time, and Alberta still has two more town halls to get that part right.
What would you need to hear before you would want a project like this next door?
