The power keeps chasing the compute, and now it’s a megaproject. The Greenlight Electricity Centre, a 932-megawatt gas-fired plant in Sturgeon County, Alberta, reached a final investment decision this month at a total cost near $4.6 billion. It exists to do one thing: power a major data center under a long-term tolling agreement. An Aecon-led consortium holds the contract to build it.
The deal and the builders
Aecon, partnered with Tecnicas Reunidas Alberta, carries the fixed-price engineering, procurement and construction package, with Aecon’s share adding about C$1.7 billion to its backlog. The combined-cycle design pairs gas turbines with a heat-recovery steam cycle to wring more electricity from each unit of fuel. Ownership runs through a partnership of Pembina Pipeline and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, at 47.5 percent each, with Kineticor holding the rest. Construction starts in the third quarter of 2026, and the plant is due in service in the second half of 2030. The full project profile lays out the numbers.
Why a dedicated power plant, and why now
Building a nearly billion-watt plant to serve a single customer is a blunt statement about the grid. Utilities can’t add hyperscale-sized load on the timeline AI operators demand, so developers are siting firm, dispatchable generation next to the data center itself. Alberta’s deregulated power market makes that easier than most places. The tolling structure, where the data center pays for capacity whether or not it draws the full load, is what makes a project this size financeable in the first place.
The template spreads
Greenlight is permitted to roughly double to 1,864 MW, so the $4.6 billion is a floor, not a ceiling. According to Engineering News-Record, the consortium’s contract is fixed-price. Expect more of these grid-adjacent gas plants wherever AI load outruns what the local utility can build, and expect the fight over what that does to emissions and rates to follow them.