AINEWS
In Morinville, a 20 year old organizer pulled dozens to protest Meta's first Canadian data centre, citing strain on water, the grid, and the climate.
Dozens of people gathered in Morinville on Saturday to push back against Meta's planned $13-billion-plus data centre in neighbouring Sturgeon County, north of Edmonton. It is the social media company's first Canadian site and one of the largest single-load industrial builds Alberta has tried to land.
The protest was organized by 20-year-old Ben Baril, who named four concerns: strain on Alberta's water supply, pressure on the local energy grid, the project's contribution to the climate crisis, and the AI-related job losses tied to the wider Canadian data-centre buildout. Baril watched the announcement and decided to act.
Meta's July 2026 announcement describes a one-gigawatt facility, a single campus drawing as much continuous electricity as a mid-sized Canadian city, to be built in Sturgeon County, with a price tag Meta puts at more than $13 billion (Canadian dollars, roughly $9.5 billion USD at current exchange rates). Meta has said the centre will come online within two to three years.
Premier Danielle Smith has argued the load is something Alberta can absorb without new generation. Under the province's plan, the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) will route surplus electricity to the Meta site until a new natural-gas-fired plant, the Greenlight Electricity Centre, comes online in 2030 and takes over as the dedicated power source. The pitch, repeated in the premier's office and in the Sturgeon County data-centre development documents, is that the build sits inside existing capacity: Alberta has more power than it needs, and AI demand is a way to monetize the difference.
A one-gigawatt site is roughly the continuous draw of 700,000 to one million homes. Alberta's "surplus" pitch works because the province has been running with spare capacity left over from a decade of coal-to-gas switching. A facility of this size does not draw on leftover capacity; it consumes a dedicated baseload. The 2030 in-service date for Greenlight is the moment that baseload is built, and it is built new: a greenfield natural-gas plant, not a restart of an existing unit.
The Environmental Law Centre has asked whether Alberta is being "smart" about the buildout, noting that data centres' water and power footprints tend to outrun their announced efficiency gains. The Winnipeg Free Press reported the Morinville protest, while CBC Edmonton covered the groundbreaking from the project side.
Baril's concerns are not abstractions for the people who live inside the service area. The Sturgeon region sits inside the North Saskatchewan River basin, the same watershed that supplies Edmonton and a wide agricultural belt. A campus-scale cooling load sits on top of a watershed that has spent the last decade negotiating allocations between municipalities, industry, and irrigation. The grid question lands the same way: a one-gigawatt single load on a regional transmission system triggers upgrade costs the project announcement does not price in.
The AI-jobs concern is the most contested of the four. Construction jobs on a project this size are short-term and concentrated; long-term operations roles are smaller. The net employment count is not the same as the construction peak. Baril raised it as one worry among others. The province's pitch assumes the long-run employment picture is positive.
The 2030 Greenlight in-service date settles the question. If the plant comes online before Meta's load, surplus is policy framing. If the plant is built to follow the load, the new gas was always part of the plan.