Alberta is so back. Stampede wrapped, and while the rest of us were nursing a ten-day social hangover, Alberta quietly had the best economic week it’s had in a long time. Four announcements, potentially more than a hundred billion dollars of investment if they all land. For the first time in my adult life, this province is about to build the entire stack: pull energy out of the ground, use it to make something the world wants, sell that, and tax it right here. Let me start with the one that matters most, because it’s the one people are complaining about. The data center comes to the energy On Wednesday last week, Meta announced a thirteen-billion-dollar data center in Sturgeon County, about an hour northeast of Edmonton. Its first in Canada, its thirty-third globally, and its largest anywhere outside the United States. Put one gigawatt in perspective. The entire city of Edmonton, every house, every hospital, every rink, runs on about 1.4 gigawatts. This one campus, roughly the size of 33 CFL fields, will pull close to two-thirds of what the whole city next door uses. The incoming script: Community meetings… angry residents… “Big Tech is going to spike my power bill.” Giant new load shows up, prices go up, Econ 101. Except the data mostly says the opposite, and it’s worth understanding why. A power grid is a fixed-cost machine. You pay for the transmission lines, the substations, the transformers whether electrons flow through them or not. Across a full day, most grids run at maybe 55 to 60 percent of capacity. A data center runs at 90 to 95 percent, around the clock, every day. It’s the customer who buys a seat on every single flight instead of leaving half the plane empty. Fill those seats and the cost per seat falls for everyone. EPRI, about the most sober outfit in the industry, found that for every 10 percent bump in data center capacity in a state, residential rates fell about 0.4 percent, and in the states that grew capacity fastest, bills came down around 6 percent. Then there’s the fiscal side, which is the fun part. Loudoun County, Virginia, is the densest cluster of data centers on Earth. They sit on about 4 percent of the commercial land and throw off 38 percent of the county’s general-fund revenue. Loudoun has cut its residential property tax rate every year for a decade, from $1.145 down to $0.805 per hundred dollars of value. A 2026 analysis found that without the data centers, that rate would nearly double, roughly $5,800 a year for a typical homeowner. If you live in the Edmonton region, you already understand this intuitively. It’s the same reason Strathcona County homeowners pay less: the refineries carry the bill. Server racks are about to do the same thing for Sturgeon County. Here’s what Mel rightly kept flagging. The legitimate criticism of US data centers is cost allocation. When a hyperscaler plugs into an existing grid and the utility builds new generation to serve it and socializes that cost across everyone’s bill, ratepayers really can get hurt before the benefits show up. Alberta solved that. The province lets data centers generate their own power, and it structured the tax so that if you draw from the grid you pay more, and if you bring your own generation you pay less. Meta isn’t showing up to drink from the existing pool. Pembina, Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners, and Kineticor are building the Greenlight Electricity Centre right next door: 932 megawatts of new gas-fired power, $4.6 billion, permitted to double. New load, new supply, financed by the customer. The subsidy fight poisoning these projects in Ohio and Georgia basically doesn’t exist here. And the talent piece is the part outsiders miss. I’ve heard genuine horror stories about how hard these things are to build in the US, because the electrical systems are brutally complex and the skilled trades are stretched thin. Albertans are unusually good at exactly this. Drive north to Grande Prairie, Fort McMurray, Cold Lake, or walk the refineries around Edmonton, and you’re looking at some of the most complex energy systems on the planet, built and run by people who do this for a living. Meta figured out it can build a state-of-the-art closed-loop, liquid-cooled facility here, with more consistent power, for something like half what it costs in Texas. If they can do it for thirteen to twenty billion instead of double that, I can genuinely see a path where they build ten of these. So how do you actually make money on it? A friend asked me the obvious question: how do we invest in this? And the intuitive answer, “just buy Meta,” is probably the wrong one locally. Everybody races to the hyperscaler at the top of the stack. The value you can actually reach shows up at the bottom. The electrical contractors who wire these things. The land developers. And above all, the power. Meta and the next nine tenants can’t always build their own generation, which means power purchase agreements, which means the companies that can sell them electricity, whether that’s natural gas, wind, or solar, just found a twenty-year, investment-grade customer. Watch the merchant power names and the midstream players like Pembina, who just found a growth vertical that has nothing to do with pipeline-egress politics. And it’s not a coincidence any of this landed in the lowest-taxed province in the country. The pipelines: Two pipelines hit the table this week. The big one is the West Coast oil line. On July 2 Alberta submitted it to the federal Major Projects Office, and the news that mattered was a private proponent: Pembina, taking a 10 percent economic interest with the option to go higher. It’s a million-barrel-a-day line from the Edmonton area to the BC coast, and it lays on the Trans Mountain corridor for most of its length(85-90%). Notably, it’s a southern route, not the shorter northern one that would sit closer to Asia and take bigger tankers, because the northern tanker ban is not going away. Carney has said as much. We should hear by October 1 whether Ottawa lists it as a project of national interest, with shovels possibly in the ground by late 2027. All of it plays out against an Alberta referendum on October 19. The second line, a proposed Alberta-to-Ontario route announced July 6, is still at the ideation stage. I wouldn’t put a number on its odds. It reads less like a construction plan and more like a signal: provinces cooperating, “build in Canada, stay in Canada,” which is a pointed message from a UCP government that critics love to call separatist. Talk to politicians and the public and everything sounds fantastic. Talk to the people who actually allocate capital to mega-projects, and the needle has barely moved. Because the fundamentals haven’t changed. The tanker ban is still there. The C-69 consultation uncertainty is still there. The carbon tax is still there. What changed is that we have a Prime Minister personally willing to champion a project. And that’s the risk hiding inside the good news. When one individual, through his own leadership, is making the exceptions and pushing the project through, you still don’t have a framework. You have a man. If Mark Carney weren’t Prime Minister, Canada would not be in a structurally better position than it was under Trudeau, because the institutions that would give an allocator certainty still don’t exist. It rhymes, uncomfortably, with investing in a jurisdiction where the rules depend on who’s in the chair rather than what’s written down. It’s good news. It’s real. But you can’t run a resource economy on catching a few project interests once a decade because the right person happened to be in office. The work of locking in durable investment certainty is still ahead of us. The tape, and the geopolitics underneath it The market gave us a perfect illustration of where AI is in its cycle. Meta launched “Meta Compute,” selling its excess AI capacity against AWS, Azure, and Google, and the stock popped more than five percent. But the same headli… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit reformedmillennials.substack.com
