August 11, 2026
Reading time: 8 minutes
Full Story: The Energy Mix
Jody MacPherson
Giacomo Maestri for ECMWF/flickr
The Alberta county council that granted permits for Meta’s new $13-billion, climate-polluting, gas-powered artificial intelligence (AI) data centre has declared an agricultural disaster due to record-setting extreme weather attributed largely to climate change.
The county’s council held a special meeting August 6 to discuss the unfolding farm disaster in the municipality of 20,000 on the northern outskirts of Edmonton. They voted unanimously to send a letter to the provincial and federal governments requesting financial help for agricultural producers.
Councillor Deanna Stang said the reach of the disaster is “bigger than people anticipate.”
“This affects not just the cereal crops,” she said. “Come the fall, trying to get hay is going to be a challenge, and they’re going to have to cull their herd.”
Councillor Richard Boissonneault agreed, adding “we’re going to have some real challenges moving into threshing season here. Those fields are so wet, it’s unbelievable and I feel for all these people.”
In a news release, the county said the excessive moisture, localized flooding, and prolonged wet weather have “substantially affected field access, delayed seeding and harvest activities, hindered crop development, and reduced overall agricultural productivity.”
Sturgeon County Mayor Alanna Hnatiw did not agree to an interview or provide written answers to The Energy Mix’s questions about Meta data centre emissions and the climate change impacts on local farmers.
Sturgeon joined nearby Thorhild, Westlock, Wetaskiwin, and Beaver counties, all of which had already declared agricultural disasters, representing more than 13,600 square kilometres of the province.
Rob Siewert, chair of the Agricultural Service Board’s provincial committee, told CBC News that disaster declarations on their own do not automatically create funding or compensation, “but it does set the stage and gets the federal and provincial governments talking.”
Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation Minister Tara Sawyer did not respond to questions from The Mix about the agricultural disaster or the impacts of emissions from data centres on the province’s farming industry.
According to documents filed [pdf] with the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada (IAAC), Meta’s gas power plant would emit 5,677 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2e) per year, equivalent to burning almost 3,000 tonnes of coal.
A recent poll by Leger found that 79% of Canadian respondents are concerned about the environmental impacts of data centres, including their greenhouse gas emissions.
In its own Climate Adaptation Plan written in 2022, Sturgeon County identified lowland flooding due to heavy precipitation as a high risk for the municipality as a result of climate change. Damaging heavy rainfall incidents of more than 10 millimetres in one day were estimated to be twice as likely to occur in the future.
Edmonton recently saw a deluge of more than 30 millimetres in one hour, CBC reported. And it’s not over, with the drenched ground and warmer temperatures expected to continue the pattern over the rest of the summer.
More than 533 millimetres of total rain fell June 1 to July 31, breaking the previous record of 417 mm. set in 1953. Heavy downpours caused flooding, road closures, toppled trees, power outages, and event cancellations. A City of Edmonton official said damage from the storms could cost up to $30 million.
Environment and Climate Change Canada meteorologist Dan Fulton told CBC there are a couple of factors driving the heavy rainfall.
“It’s a combination of climate change, which is the warmer atmosphere, and the jet stream breaking down a little bit and not moving the storms on as much as they normally do—which might be a climate change thing, too, but that varies from year to year,” he said.
Just as the July storms were beginning to hammer the area, residents learned for the first time that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, would locate its first Canadian AI data centre in Sturgeon County. In a timeline provided by the county, residents discovered that Meta’s permit approvals were given without public input. This was possible because the council changed its land use bylaw more than a year ago, adding data centres as a permitted use within designated industrial zones.
According to the county’s website, development permits are often not made public until after they are approved. As long as the planned project matches zoning requirements, the site says officials don’t have to consult with the public, and may be constrained by non-disclosure agreements as well as provincial privacy laws.
Meta’s Sturgeon AI data centre will be located in a designated industrial zone and consume one gigawatt (GW) of electricity, enough to power about a million homes. The company has an agreement for gas-generated power supplied by the yet-to-be-built Greenlight Electricity Centre, a $4.6-billion project funded by Pembina Pipeline Corporation, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, and Kineticor Asset Management. The power plant was approved [pdf] separately from the data centre by the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) in June.
Sturgeon County did not participate in the AUC hearing on Greenlight, according to the AUC decision letter. The AUC does not regulate [pdf] data centres, only the electricity required to run them.
Since Greenlight won’t be up and running until the second half of 2030, Meta has been allocated 970 megawatts (MW) from Alberta’s grid, almost enough to meet its full requirement for compute power. The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) is also preparing to open up an additional 1.6 GW of grid electricity to data centres on a temporary basis, raising concerns about price increases for ratepayers.
A second hyperscale AI data centre, the Beacon AI Heartland Data Centre Hub, is also close to being approved for Sturgeon County. It’s currently in the late stages of the AUC hearing process and will draw another 920 MW of electricity, also gas-powered.
The Beacon AI data centre and Greenlight were each exempted from an environmental impact assessment (EIA) by both the federal and provincial governments. According to the province’s website, environmental impact assessments are required “where the complexity and scale of a proposed project, technology, resource allocation, or siting considerations create uncertainty about the exact nature of environmental effects, or result in a potential for significant adverse environmental effects.”
Sabrina Perić, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Calgary and co-director of the Energy Stories Lab, wrote in her Substack newsletter that there is a pattern of “abbreviation of environmental review” in Alberta.
The government claimed on its newly-launched data centre web pages that EIA is reserved for projects involving “genuinely uncertain: new or complex technology, impacts that are hard to predict, or cumulative stress on a region.” But Perić said simply applying a “novelty test” is not what the law says.
“The statute could not be clearer that scale and cumulative burden are central,” she wrote. “The government’s website erased them and substituted a novelty test that appears nowhere in the Act.”
“It’s not just that big projects will face less environmental scrutiny, but that the people who live alongside these projects will have fewer and fewer official ways to object,” Petric added. “A novelty test that exempts almost everything is a novelty test that silences almost everyone.”
Alberta Innovation and Technology Minister Nate Glubish told reporters at the Meta announcement in early July the Meta project is indeed a first. He said Alberta’s data centre concierge team was “in talks with at least 60 different project proponents at this point in time.”
“There are several gigawatt-scale campus proposals that are in various stages of development,” he said. “This (Meta’s data centre) is the first of its kind, the first of this size, the first of this scale, but it won’t be the last.”
Another 39 large-load data centre projects are waiting in the wings with requests for a total of almost 20 GW of grid power, according to the AESO connection dashboard.
Glubish did not respond to The Mix’s questions about the agricultural disaster, recent court decisions about Meta’s child safety failures, or the impact of gas-powered data centre emissions. Meta did not respond to any questions from The Mix. Alberta’s Environment and Protected Areas Minister Grant Hunter did not respond to questions about environmental approvals or the environmental impact assessment of the Meta data centre. The data centre is not listed publicly on the AEPA website as currently undergoing an EIA.
Nathan Ip, Alberta New Democratic Party (NDP) shadow minister for technology and innovation, said in a statement that the NDP “shares Albertans’ concerns about the lack of environmental studies as well as what these data centres will do to our power and natural gas bills.”
Ip said his party caucus is holding a series of meetings “to hear directly from Albertans about where they stand on AI data centres,” and will “take the information gathered during this month’s listening tour to develop our AI data centre plan.”
The NDP did not answer The Mix’s detailed questions about the meetings or the agricultural disaster declaration, agreeing to an interview only after the public meetings were complete.
After the NDP launched its meetings, the provincial government announced its own series of town halls for Albertans “to ask questions and learn more about data centres.” The first takes place Aug. 19 in Ponoka and another will be held Aug. 20 in Sturgeon County, followed by a third Sept. 11 in Grande Prairie. Premier Danielle Smith will also join Glubish for a virtual town hall Aug. 27.
This story is part of The Energy Mix’s partnership with Small Change Fund.
Giacomo Maestri for ECMWF/flickr
The Alberta county council that granted permits for Meta’s new $13-billion, climate-polluting, gas-powered artificial intelligence (AI) data centre has declared an agricultural disaster due to record-setting extreme weather attributed largely to climate change.
The county’s council held a special meeting August 6 to discuss the unfolding farm disaster in the municipality of 20,000 on the northern outskirts of Edmonton. They voted unanimously to send a letter to the provincial and federal governments requesting financial help for agricultural producers.
Councillor Deanna Stang said the reach of the disaster is “bigger than people anticipate.”
“This affects not just the cereal crops,” she said. “Come the fall, trying to get hay is going to be a challenge, and they’re going to have to cull their herd.”
Councillor Richard Boissonneault agreed, adding “we’re going to have some real challenges moving into threshing season here. Those fields are so wet, it’s unbelievable and I feel for all these people.”
In a news release, the county said the excessive moisture, localized flooding, and prolonged wet weather have “substantially affected field access, delayed seeding and harvest activities, hindered crop development, and reduced overall agricultural productivity.”
Sturgeon County Mayor Alanna Hnatiw did not agree to an interview or provide written answers to The Energy Mix’s questions about Meta data centre emissions and the climate change impacts on local farmers.
Sturgeon joined nearby Thorhild, Westlock, Wetaskiwin, and Beaver counties, all of which had already declared agricultural disasters, representing more than 13,600 square kilometres of the province.
Rob Siewert, chair of the Agricultural Service Board’s provincial committee, told CBC News that disaster declarations on their own do not automatically create funding or compensation, “but it does set the stage and gets the federal and provincial governments talking.”
Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation Minister Tara Sawyer did not respond to questions from The Mix about the agricultural disaster or the impacts of emissions from data centres on the province’s farming industry.
According to documents filed [pdf] with the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada (IAAC), Meta’s gas power plant would emit 5,677 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2e) per year, equivalent to burning almost 3,000 tonnes of coal.
A recent poll by Leger found that 79% of Canadian respondents are concerned about the environmental impacts of data centres, including their greenhouse gas emissions.
In its own Climate Adaptation Plan written in 2022, Sturgeon County identified lowland flooding due to heavy precipitation as a high risk for the municipality as a result of climate change. Damaging heavy rainfall incidents of more than 10 millimetres in one day were estimated to be twice as likely to occur in the future.
Edmonton recently saw a deluge of more than 30 millimetres in one hour, CBC reported. And it’s not over, with the drenched ground and warmer temperatures expected to continue the pattern over the rest of the summer.
More than 533 millimetres of total rain fell June 1 to July 31, breaking the previous record of 417 mm. set in 1953. Heavy downpours caused flooding, road closures, toppled trees, power outages, and event cancellations. A City of Edmonton official said damage from the storms could cost up to $30 million.
Environment and Climate Change Canada meteorologist Dan Fulton told CBC there are a couple of factors driving the heavy rainfall.
“It’s a combination of climate change, which is the warmer atmosphere, and the jet stream breaking down a little bit and not moving the storms on as much as they normally do—which might be a climate change thing, too, but that varies from year to year,” he said.
Just as the July storms were beginning to hammer the area, residents learned for the first time that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, would locate its first Canadian AI data centre in Sturgeon County. In a timeline provided by the county, residents discovered that Meta’s permit approvals were given without public input. This was possible because the council changed its land use bylaw more than a year ago, adding data centres as a permitted use within designated industrial zones.
According to the county’s website, development permits are often not made public until after they are approved. As long as the planned project matches zoning requirements, the site says officials don’t have to consult with the public, and may be constrained by non-disclosure agreements as well as provincial privacy laws.
Meta’s Sturgeon AI data centre will be located in a designated industrial zone and consume one gigawatt (GW) of electricity, enough to power about a million homes. The company has an agreement for gas-generated power supplied by the yet-to-be-built Greenlight Electricity Centre, a $4.6-billion project funded by Pembina Pipeline Corporation, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, and Kineticor Asset Management. The power plant was approved [pdf] separately from the data centre by the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) in June.
Sturgeon County did not participate in the AUC hearing on Greenlight, according to the AUC decision letter. The AUC does not regulate [pdf] data centres, only the electricity required to run them.
Since Greenlight won’t be up and running until the second half of 2030, Meta has been allocated 970 megawatts (MW) from Alberta’s grid, almost enough to meet its full requirement for compute power. The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) is also preparing to open up an additional 1.6 GW of grid electricity to data centres on a temporary basis, raising concerns about price increases for ratepayers.
A second hyperscale AI data centre, the Beacon AI Heartland Data Centre Hub, is also close to being approved for Sturgeon County. It’s currently in the late stages of the AUC hearing process and will draw another 920 MW of electricity, also gas-powered.
The Beacon AI data centre and Greenlight were each exempted from an environmental impact assessment (EIA) by both the federal and provincial governments. According to the province’s website, environmental impact assessments are required “where the complexity and scale of a proposed project, technology, resource allocation, or siting considerations create uncertainty about the exact nature of environmental effects, or result in a potential for significant adverse environmental effects.”
Sabrina Perić, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Calgary and co-director of the Energy Stories Lab, wrote in her Substack newsletter that there is a pattern of “abbreviation of environmental review” in Alberta.
The government claimed on its newly-launched data centre web pages that EIA is reserved for projects involving “genuinely uncertain: new or complex technology, impacts that are hard to predict, or cumulative stress on a region.” But Perić said simply applying a “novelty test” is not what the law says.
“The statute could not be clearer that scale and cumulative burden are central,” she wrote. “The government’s website erased them and substituted a novelty test that appears nowhere in the Act.”
“It’s not just that big projects will face less environmental scrutiny, but that the people who live alongside these projects will have fewer and fewer official ways to object,” Petric added. “A novelty test that exempts almost everything is a novelty test that silences almost everyone.”
Alberta Innovation and Technology Minister Nate Glubish told reporters at the Meta announcement in early July the Meta project is indeed a first. He said Alberta’s data centre concierge team was “in talks with at least 60 different project proponents at this point in time.”
“There are several gigawatt-scale campus proposals that are in various stages of development,” he said. “This (Meta’s data centre) is the first of its kind, the first of this size, the first of this scale, but it won’t be the last.”
Another 39 large-load data centre projects are waiting in the wings with requests for a total of almost 20 GW of grid power, according to the AESO connection dashboard.
Glubish did not respond to The Mix’s questions about the agricultural disaster, recent court decisions about Meta’s child safety failures, or the impact of gas-powered data centre emissions. Meta did not respond to any questions from The Mix. Alberta’s Environment and Protected Areas Minister Grant Hunter did not respond to questions about environmental approvals or the environmental impact assessment of the Meta data centre. The data centre is not listed publicly on the AEPA website as currently undergoing an EIA.
Nathan Ip, Alberta New Democratic Party (NDP) shadow minister for technology and innovation, said in a statement that the NDP “shares Albertans’ concerns about the lack of environmental studies as well as what these data centres will do to our power and natural gas bills.”
Ip said his party caucus is holding a series of meetings “to hear directly from Albertans about where they stand on AI data centres,” and will “take the information gathered during this month’s listening tour to develop our AI data centre plan.”
The NDP did not answer The Mix’s detailed questions about the meetings or the agricultural disaster declaration, agreeing to an interview only after the public meetings were complete.
After the NDP launched its meetings, the provincial government announced its own series of town halls for Albertans “to ask questions and learn more about data centres.” The first takes place Aug. 19 in Ponoka and another will be held Aug. 20 in Sturgeon County, followed by a third Sept. 11 in Grande Prairie. Premier Danielle Smith will also join Glubish for a virtual town hall Aug. 27.
This story is part of The Energy Mix’s partnership with Small Change Fund.