New data centre will inject $250M per year into Alberta economy: Smith

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith joins Alberta Primetime's Michael Higgins to discuss Meta's plans for a $13 billion data centre in Sturgeon County.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says a new Meta data centre will pay for itself while giving a much-needed boost to the province’s economy.

The colossal tech company’s western location choice was met with questions of its noise, energy consumption and revenue generation – the likes of which Smith told Alberta Primetime’s Michael Higgins had been carefully thought out.

“This is all private-sector funding, $13 billion, just on this alone. It’d be very similar to what you’d expect to see in any kind of industrial development,” she said on Thursday.

The Alberta government estimated Wednesday that the project will create 3,000 construction jobs and 300 jobs during operations, as well as revenue paid by Meta in royalties, taxes, levies and fees.

“We think it’ll be about $250 million a year at a minimum that this major project is going to be able to bring to the Alberta economy, or the Alberta Treasury, so that’s going to go a long way towards helping us address some of our needs.”

• County north of Edmonton says $13B Meta data centre is ‘welcome’ as water, power logistics unveiled

Wednesday’s announcement of the one-gigawatt data centre and last week’s preview announcement of the natural gas-fired plant to power the centre – the Greenlight Electricity Centre – was met with excitement from Sturgeon County officials. The county, which borders Edmonton to the north, will house both sites beside one another.

Smith says the Industrial Heartland region of Alberta is meant for projects like these.

“Sturgeon County has had an industrial zone for 40 years, so the site they’re on is a site that had initially been intended for 12 refineries. There’s a lot of social acceptance in the community for these kinds of developments, and they’ve also learned a lot from other projects that they’ve done about water usage,” she said.

“By locating it in an established industrial zone, bringing your own power, having a closed-loop water system, the amount of water they’re using is about the size of a typical golf course.”

The gargantuan data centre – it takes 1.4 gigawatts to power Edmonton, compared to this project’s one – will operate on a system that uses coolant to absorb heat, moving used water outside to cool down in Alberta air before feeding it back into the building.

The Alberta government has not said what kind of cooling system the Greenlight Electricity Centre will have.

Smith says, however, the adjacent power plant would initially hook up to the county’s power grid before creating its own energy, Smith says, meaning Albertans will see a decrease to their own transmission bills as companies Pembina Pipeline, Kineticor and Morgan Stanley work.

Also hoping to bolster the province’s economy is the newly proposed West Coast pipeline, which would follow a pre-existing Trans Mountain route from Alberta to the southern B.C. coast.

Smith said the amount of money put up by the province to get the ball rolling would pay back in dividends.

Assuming it would take $40 billion to get the project up and running, 80 per cent is financed by banks through debt, 20 per cent through equity funding. Shared between partners, the province would be on the hook for $2.5 billion; less if other private sector partners joined the project, she explained.

“To put up $2.5 billion in order to receive a trillion dollars worth of value, not just from the pipeline itself, but from the extra million barrels-a-day worth of production that it’s going to unlock, I think that’s a pretty good investment.”