Pembina Pipeline Corp. PPL-T said on Thursday it will go ahead with its planned $4.6-billion Greenlight Electricity Centre in Alberta, a project that will power the development of a major data centre for an as-yet-unnamed customer.
The Calgary-based pipeline company announced a positive final investment decision on the Greenlight project, a 932-megawatt natural gas-fired power-generation facility to be located in Sturgeon County in central Alberta.
Pembina – which is partnering with Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and Kineticor Asset Management – did not name the customer who will build the data centre, but said the data centre will be a first of its kind in Canada.
“Rapid growth in artificial intelligence and cloud computing is driving durable global demand for data centre capacity and Alberta has positioned itself as an attractive jurisdiction for significant investment,” Pembina said in a release.
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Canada currently has only five functioning data centres at the so-called hyperscale level, which means they demand at least 50 megawatts of electricity capacity, equivalent to the power needs of a small city. Nearly 100 other hyperscale data centres are in the works in Canada, and nearly 90 per cent of those are planned for Alberta. The province has been touting its massive reserves of cheap natural gas in an effort to entice tech companies, including U.S. hyperscalers, to build data centres there.
Pembina said it already has a long-term tolling agreement in place with its data centre customer, and expects the project to be in service by late 2030.
The project will require approximately 150 million cubic feet per day of natural gas, the company said, helping to create demand for Western Canadian natural gas producers.