Canada’s Pembina Advances Gas-Fired Data Center Project
(Bloomberg) -- Pembina Pipeline Corp. will move ahead with a C$4.6 billion ($3.2 billion) gas-fired electricity plant that will power a data center project in Alberta.
The Greenlight Electricity Center, a 932-megawatt plant to be built in Sturgeon County, will serve a “major data center” development, Pembina, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management said on Thursday.
The project is scheduled to be completed by the second half of 2030, the company said in a release. Pembina is responsible for C$2.3 billion of the cost.
The investment comes as the Canadian province seeks to use its vast reserves of relatively cheap natural gas to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom and push to build data centers.
A firm backed by Canadian businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary wants to build a 7.5-gigawatt data center called Wonder Valley about 300 miles northwest of the provincial capital of Edmonton. Data District, a division of Swiss-based manager Alcral AG, has partnered with Technologies New Energy Plc, or TNE, on a proposal for multiple data centers in the western Canadian province, a potential €8 billion investment.
Last fall, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed to lift clean electricity rules and emissions limits that Alberta said hindered its energy industry, pledging to raise its industrial carbon price and shore up its carbon trading system in exchange. Those moves set the stage for the Pembina project and others, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said in a press conference on Thursday.
“We have opened the doors for more projects like this,” she said. “The agreement will allow Alberta to increase oil and gas production, secure more energy projects, and attract billions of dollars in investment that will grow and diversify our economy.”
Pembina didn’t identify the company behind the data center project. In October, The Logic reported that the company was close to announcing a deal to build an AI data center northeast of Edmonton for tech giant Meta Platforms Inc., citing three people familiar with the project. An email to Meta wasn’t immediately returned.
The company’s shares rose 0.3% to C$65.82 in Toronto on Thursday.
Separately, Aecon Group Inc. also announced that TRA, a majority-held consortium with Técnicas Reunidas Alberta, was awarded a data center development contract for the project in which Aecon is to receive a C$1.7 billion share.
(Updates with report on Meta, Alberta premier comment in sixth to eighth paragraphs. An earlier version of this story corrected the spelling of the company name in the headline.)
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