Kevin O’Leary, a Canadian TV personality, investor and frequent flyer to Donald Trump’s Florida mansion, wants to build the world’s largest artificial intelligence data centre in the Municipal District of Greenview.
AI data centres require huge amounts of electricity to run servers and water for cooling.
O’Leary, also known as “Mr. Wonderful,” is calling this project Wonder Valley.
The location is no accident. Greenview, south of Grande Prairie, sits atop a huge supply of natural gas known as the Montney Formation.
Big power needs, huge emissions
Pembina Institute senior analyst Jason Wang crunched the numbers on this $70 billion plan that will run on 7.5 Gigawatts of gas-fired power.
According to Wang’s analysis, Wonder Valley would be anything but wonderful, dumping between 25.7 to 30.5 megatonnes of pollution into the atmosphere. The project would annihilate the gains made when Alberta phased out the last of its coal-fired power plants in 2023.
“It would be the equivalent of a return to the era of mostly coal-fired electricity,” Wang said, in an interview with The Energy Mix.
Part of the provincial plan
O’Leary, who is chairman of O’Leary Ventures, announced Wonder Valley almost a year ago, days after the provincial government stated its plans for legislation that will make Alberta a favored investment destination for AI data centres.
At the time Innovation and Technology Minister Nate Glubish said Alberta’s abundant natural gas, cold climate and low taxes could drive $100 billion of investment in the sector. Glubish also said data centre energy demands would help Premier Danielle Smith reach her goal of doubling Alberta’s oil and gas production.
In a statement released December, O’Leary said “we will be in the ground and up and running sooner than any scale project of its kind.” He added that the proposed Greenview Industrial Gateway (GIG) location offered proximity to “stranded sources of natural gas, pipeline infrastructure, water and a fibre optic network…”
Despite optimism, Wonder Valley far from a sure thing
The Municipal District of Greenview confirmed to The Rockies.Life that it has entered into an agreement to sell land to O’Leary Ventures.
“The GIG was established and approved as an industrial park, and the proposed project aligns with that intended land use,” said Greenview Reeve Ryan Ratzlaff. “At this stage, no formal application has been submitted, which means the formal consultation process has not yet begun.”
Data centre power demands put pressure on the grid
Last month, the provincial government introduced Bill 8, which it hopes will pave the way for data centre development. The legislation, if passed, will allow data centre owners to generate their own electricity and also require them to pay for any needed upgrades to the transmission grid.
The Alberta Electric System Operator has hit its limit on power allocation for data centres with a cap of 1200 megawatts per project. Consequently 37 AI data centres are stuck in a power log jam. Bill 8 is meant to clear the log jam and expedite approvals for projects that generate their own power.
There are currently more than a dozen fully operational data centres in Alberta. The largest is Hut 8, a 67 megawatt data centre in Medicine Hat.
At full build-out, O’Leary’s proposed Wonder Valley would require more than 110 times the amount of electricity than Hut 8 to run its computer servers and consume 10 percent of Alberta’s gas supply, according to the Pembina Institute’s Jason Wang.It’s not just a pollution problem. Wang concluded that the data centre’s water needs would be vast, “rivalling the annual use of hundreds of thousands of Alberta households.”
