Seven Ways to Power a Data Centre: What Alberta's First Live Case Tells Us About the Next Fifty Years

Alberta just approved a $4.6 billion natural gas plant to power Meta's first Canadian data centre - the Greenlight Electricity Centre, 932 megawatts, in Sturgeon County. There are 37 more data centre projects in Alberta’s queue asking for over 19 GW of Alberta power. This is genuinely exciting: real jobs, real capital, anchor infrastructure for the AI economy Canada wants to build.

This paper looks at how Alberta could build this wave of projects even better - lower cost, lower emissions, using the natural advantages the province already has. Alberta's wind is better than Texas. Its natural gas is cheaper. It hosts the world's largest-capacity CO₂ pipeline, running through the same municipality where the new plant is being built. And it already has more than 6 GW of installed wind and solar.

We model seven ways to power the same data centre using only Alberta resources, under four different emissions frameworks. Two findings matter.

• Building cleaner today costs 30% less by the time we reach Canada's legislated 2050 net zero commitment. The plant as approved is less expensive to build, but reaching net zero from it later requires permanent carbon removal for roughly 100 million tonnes of accumulated emissions. Building at-source abatement into the project from day one - more carbon capture, integrated renewables, certified low-methane gas - is dramatically cheaper than removing those emissions from the atmosphere afterward.
• With modern grid interconnection, cleaner electricity costs less than unabated gas. This is the pattern Texas has built - fast interconnection, mature power purchase markets, streamlined renewables permitting, easy CO₂ pipeline access. Alberta has all the natural advantages Texas has and some that Texas doesn't. What's missing is the enabling infrastructure - the "plumbing" that lets the cleaner answer be the fast, easy answer. Build that plumbing and cleaner electricity costs 28% less than the plant currently being built on delivered energy alone - and 60% less once we account for reaching net zero.

Three windows are open right now that will shape how the 37 projects in Alberta's data centre queue get built:

• Alberta's AI data centre policy framework, being finalized this month.
• AESO Phase II Large Load Integration, being designed in parallel.
• Canada's Sustainable Finance Taxonomy consultation, closing August 13.

Get this right, and Canada avoids adding 100 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent to the atmosphere from this one project - roughly 15% of the country's annual emissions, from a single facility, over the next thirty years.

Alberta has everything it needs to lead North America in clean industrial infrastructure for the AI economy - on its own resources, on its own terms, with its own workforce. This paper is about how.