A $13 billion data centre is going up in Sturgeon County, and the county calls the project welcome. The neighbours want answers before they agree.
Key facts
- Meta is spending more than $13 billion on its first Canadian data centre, in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland north of Edmonton.
- Meta cites more than 300 permanent jobs and up to 3,000 workers at peak construction, and the facility needs close to a gigawatt of power.
- The power comes from the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a $4.6 billion gas plant of 932 megawatts, listed in the Alberta major projects registry as due in service around 2030.
- Meta says it will match the site’s electricity use with 100% clean and renewable energy, while most of the physical power will come from the gas plant.
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 north 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.
Albertans have already turned out to ask what that means for them. The province held its first data centre town hall in Lacombe, and a second one in northern Sturgeon County on August 20 drew angry residents. A virtual session with the premier and a stop in Grande Prairie are still to come, before any of this is 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 in the second half of 2030, with the campus able to grow toward 1.8 gigawatts.
Meta says it will match the site’s electricity use with clean and renewable energy it contracts. That kind of matching credits generation happening elsewhere on the grid rather than electrons flowing directly from a wind farm to the data centre, and it is standard industry practice. It also 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’s series of town halls acknowledges.
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.
Related from Alberta Tribune: Be Honest About the Jobs a Data Centre Brings
