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Some communities are pushing back. Rocky View County, near Calgary, has imposed a temporary moratorium on new data centre proposals
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As an Alberta power producer took a victory lap Wednesday over its contract to help electrify Meta Platforms Inc.’s data centre north of Edmonton, local politicians to the south put a stop sign in front of the industry.
Capital Power Corp. said it will supply the province’s newest data centre with plants it already owns and says it can do it without straining reliability or affordability for Albertans.
“Alberta is open for business,” Avik Dey, chief executive officer of Capital Power, said on a quarterly earnings call Wednesday, crediting clearer government rules that put the province near the front of North America’s data centre market.
“New customers and Alberta’s existing industries together mean the province will need a lot more reliable electricity in the years ahead,” Dey said.
Capital Power agreed in early July to supply 250 megawatts of electricity to a giant, $13-billion data centre Meta is building 20 minutes outside of Edmonton, on a deal running longer than 10 years. The power starts flowing in the second half of 2028.
The Alberta government is looking to attract even more data centres to generate investment and find new customers for the province’s natural gas producers, which have dealt with sagging prices.
Some communities are pushing back. Rocky View County, near Calgary, has imposed a temporary moratorium on new data centre proposals.
The area’s municipal council voted 5-2 on July 21 to stop new applications to rezone land for data centre use, until new rules are in place, which councillors expect this fall.
At the same meeting, the council received a long list of letters and emails from residents of the county who are opposed to data centres.
“No one wants these. Listen to the taxpayers,” Amanda Jo Couture wrote. Another resident, Beatrice Renton, wrote to say her family has owned farms in the county for more than 60 years.
“We are opposed to any data centre development in the Langdon area,” Renton wrote. “This is not in keeping with the vital agricultural use of these lands which are under threat with the intrusion of data centres and the like.”
North of Edmonton, Capital Power said it is not building any new infrastructure for Meta or making additional capital investments to serve its deal.
“The agreement does not tie up any single facility,” Dey said.
The 250 megawatts will come from Capital Power’s broader Alberta operations, leaving Genesee, its largest plant, free to sell to other customers. Genesee sits about 75 kilometres southwest of Edmonton, near Warburg, and supplies roughly 10 percent of Alberta’s electrical grid.
Genesee is “one of the most attractive sites in all North America for data centre development, but most importantly, without compromising affordability and reliability to the consumers that we serve in Alberta,” Dey said.
None of that has hit the books yet. The Meta power does not start flowing for another couple of years.
Capital Power’s quarterly earnings told a less flattering story. The company reported a net loss of $43 million, or 33 cents a share, a narrower loss than the $131 million it dropped in the same quarter last year. Over the first six months the company is down $28 million after a $19 million profit a year ago.
“Alberta demand growth is accelerating,” chief financial officer Kevin Macintosh said in a conference call about the earnings. “Power market fundamentals are strengthening, and we’re seeing tangible evidence that customers are willing to pay for reliable, dispatchable power.”
Nearly all of Canada’s planned data centre capacity, 92 percent, is headed to Alberta, according to researchers at York University’s Schulich School of Business, while holding 10 percent of the facilities running today. The megawatts may be ready. The zoning is not.
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