Greenlight Electricity Centre — Sturgeon County, Alberta

The power keeps chasing the compute. Greenlight Electricity Centre, a 932-megawatt gas-fired combined-cycle plant in Sturgeon County, Alberta, reached a final investment decision this month with a total cost near $4.6 billion, and it exists for one reason: to feed a major data center under a long-term tolling deal. Construction is set to begin in the third quarter of 2026, with the plant entering service in the second half of 2030.

Project Scope

An Aecon-led consortium, partnered with Tecnicas Reunidas Alberta, holds the fixed-price engineering, procurement and construction contract; Aecon’s share adds about C$1.7 billion to its backlog. The combined-cycle design pairs gas turbines with a heat-recovery steam cycle to squeeze more electricity out of each unit of fuel, and the site is permitted to roughly double to 1,864 MW as demand grows. Ownership runs through the Greenlight Electricity Centre Limited Partnership, split between Pembina Pipeline and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners at 47.5 percent each, with Kineticor Asset Management holding the rest.

Why It Matters

Data centers are rewriting the power map faster than grids can respond, and Alberta’s deregulated market has become a magnet for developers who want firm, dispatchable generation sited next to the load. A dedicated 932 MW plant is a blunt admission that the grid alone can’t supply hyperscale AI campuses on the timeline operators demand. The tolling structure, where the data center pays for capacity regardless of how much it draws, is what makes a project this size financeable. Expect more of these grid-adjacent gas plants as long as electricity demand from AI keeps outrunning what utilities can build.

Project Team & Details