Sturgeon residents plan to protest the Meta AI data centre being built in their county.

The protest is to take place outside the Sturgeon County office building in Morinville on Sunday, Aug. 2, from noon until 2 p.m. and has been organized by a group calling itself Sturgeon County Anti AI.

About 100 residents have also registered an appeal of the development permit for the project with the Land & Property Rights Tribunal. A preliminary hearing on this matter is set to take place on Aug. 14.

Meanwhile, the Alberta Federation of Labour is warning that the data centre will further increase Alberta’s already high electricity prices.

Albertans pay the highest electricity rates in Canada, the federation notes. Its 2024 report “Power in the Public Interest,” found that we paid roughly $24 billion more than we would have had we not deregulated in 2001. This report was recently confirmed in the C.D. Howe Institute’s June 2026 commentary “Powering Ahead.”

Although the new Meta data centre will eventually rely in its own natural gas power plant, that plant won’t open until well after the data centre begins operation, the federation notes.

“Without any public consultation, the Smith government signed a deal that lets Meta, a foreign corporation, draw as much power as the entire city of Edmonton – for at least two years – before Meta’s own power plant is even running,” says Gil McGowan, President of the Alberta Federation of Labour.

“As we showed in Power in the Public Interest, twenty years of deregulated, privatized power has already given Albertans the highest prices and the least reliable grid in the country. This deal makes a bad situation worse.”

Meta officially broke ground on a $13 billion data centre for Sturgeon County on July 8, the same time the company revealed their involvement in the project.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says the project will generate $250 million annually in royalties and taxes, as well as adding 3,000 construction jobs and 300 permanent positions.

Meta officials note that the data centre will use a closed loop cooling system that will greatly reduce water consumption. They say it will only use about as much water as the average Alberta golf course.

That is about 100 million litres of water per year, or about equal to the annual needs of 1,000 households.

According to its own environmental assessment, the 952 KW natural gas power plant also being built for the project will use 1.25 million litres of water a day, or nearly 500 million litres a year. It will also produce 2.6 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.

The data centre is to be located on Highway 643 east of Gibbons at Range Road 223.