As Ontario burns, OPTrust-backed company moves ahead with gas plant to power Meta data centre
While OPTrust members choked on toxic wildfire smoke in Toronto, bailed out flooded basements in Ottawa, and helped evacuate communities fleeing fires in northern Ontario, a company owned by their pension manager decided to build new fossil fuel infrastructure.
In early July, three companies announced they were moving forward with the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a 932-megawatt (MW) gas plant north of Edmonton. One of them, Kineticor Asset Management, is owned by OPTrust, the manager of the $27-billion OPSEU Pension Plan for 118,000 active and retired Ontario public servants. As reported by The Logic (and since covered in Canada’s National Observer), the gas plant is being built to power a future massive Meta AI data centre.
Amnesty International has described the proposal as “a disaster for future generations and the environment… Expanding dirty gas production to meet the tech sector’s skyrocketing demands amounts to a catastrophic attack on the rights of young people and future generations to a healthy environment. This must not be allowed to pass.”
Powering Meta with fossil gas
If built, Greenlight would generate enough electricity to power a city about two-thirds the size of Calgary, while consuming approximately 150 million cubic feet of fossil gas each day. Its backers, OPTrust-owned Kineticor, Pembina Pipeline Corp., and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners (MSIP), expect the plant to begin operating in 2030, and to remain in service for “at least 40 years.”
The companies have also left the door open to a major expansion. While Greenlight is initially planned as a 932-MW gas plant, its permitted capacity could eventually double, to 1,864 MW. Meta has also cited an 1,800 MW figure as the potential eventual size of its proposed data centre – enough electricity to power roughly 800,000 homes.
The OPTrust connection to the Greenlight gas plant
OPTrust is the majority shareholder in Kineticor and two senior staff in OPTrust’s Private Markets Group sit on Kineticor’s board of directors. In announcing the decision to build the gas plant, Pembina said it “has enjoyed a strong relationship with OPTrust and Kineticor”, who together have “supported development of a new data centre industry in Alberta and positioned Greenlight as a dedicated power provider with a scalable, high growth platform.”
OPTrust-owned Kineticor “led the origination and development” of Greenlight. With the announcement of the final investment decision, Kineticor is selling its 50% ownership stake to MSIP. MSIP and Pembina will each provide half the capital needed to build the project. Kineticor will retain a 5% ownership stake in the gas plant and “be responsible for the ongoing development of future expansion opportunities.”
Climate change threatens OPTrust and its members – but its portfolio company is building gas plants and lobbying against climate policy
OPTrust states that climate change is “a pervasive threat that demands urgent action". Yet this “pervasive threat” is being driven by the combustion of fossil fuels, and OPTrust’s portfolio company is pushing more fossil fuel use.
Through Kineticor, OPTrust financed the Cascade gas plant in 2020, at the time Alberta’s biggest-ever electricity generator, locking in decades of carbon pollution. Earlier this year, Kineticor unsuccessfully attempted to develop another hyperscale data centre elsewhere in Alberta, where provincial rules essentially exclude all options for power generation except gas.
Along the way, Kineticor also lobbied against federal climate policies. Federal records show its lobbyists met with officials from eleven different government departments between 2023 and 2024 to discuss electricity-sector regulations that it said should not “discourage investment in new gas-fired generation.” Kineticor apparently argued that new gas-fired generation was necessary to replace coal – a claim which ignores the affordability, scalability, and deployability of renewable energy, as well as the risk that new gas infrastructure locks in carbon pollution for decades. Kineticor seems to be on-message with the oil and gas industry, which has tried to push a false “clean” gas narrative for decades.
Kineticor’s lobbying appears to contradict OPTrust’s own advocacy. The pension manager says in its climate-related disclosures that it advocates “for robust oversight of climate considerations, clear and measurable emissions reduction roadmaps and targets and high-quality climate data disclosures, all to improve long-term performance in a decarbonizing global economy."
Kineticor’s track record provides a cautionary tale for asset managers and asset owners who mistakenly believe that ownership of fossil fuel companies can be reconciled with a safe climate. Despite committing to net-zero and releasing a climate strategy in 2022, OPTrust now finds itself backing a company that lobbies for, develops, and invests in new gas-fired power generation. It will retain an ownership stake in a gas plant expected to operate for at least another four decades – locking in additional carbon pollution, worsening the climate crisis, and ultimately undermining the retirement security of OPTrust’s own members.
What sort of future is OPTrust envisioning?
OPTrust uses climate risk advisory provider Ortec Finance to stress-test its portfolio against different climate change scenarios. Ortec warns that Canadian pension funds could see investment returns decline by 40% by the end of the century in a high-warming scenario. Against that backdrop, using members’ retirement savings to back new gas plants is unjustifiable.
The Greenlight gas plant is expected to operate for at least 40 years. What does OPTrust think retirement will look like for Ontario public sector workers decades from now, if the infrastructure their pensions helped finance is either stranded, or still spewing carbon pollution?