Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners (MSIP) has agreed to acquire a 47.5% ownership interest in the Greenlight Electricity Centre, a large-scale power project in Sturgeon County within Alberta's Industrial Heartland, in a transaction valued at approximately C$4.6bn including financing costs. Kirkland & Ellis, working alongside Bennett Jones, advised MSIP on the acquisition and its associated financing, in a deal that underscores the growing convergence between energy infrastructure and demand from the data centre sector.
Structure of the transaction
Under the arrangement, MSIP is acquiring its stake from OPTrust, the majority shareholder in developer Kineticor Asset Management. Pembina Pipeline Corporation is participating as a co-investor with a matching 47.5% interest and will take responsibility for construction and operations management, while Kineticor retains a 5% holding and continues in a development role. Santander acted as exclusive M&A and financing adviser on the mandate, which was signed in early July 2026.
The ownership split leaves the two principal investors on an equal footing, with Kineticor remaining involved to see the facility through to completion. The combination of an infrastructure fund, a pipeline operator and a specialist developer reflects a partnership model increasingly used to spread the capital and operational demands of major generation assets.
The Greenlight Electricity Centre
The Greenlight Electricity Centre is designed as a 932-megawatt facility built around high-efficiency combined-cycle gas turbine technology. Commissioning is expected in the second half of 2030. The plant is being developed to serve a co-located data centre campus, with a major data centre development customer committed under a long-term power supply agreement that will underpin the project's revenues.
The pairing of a purpose-built generation plant with an adjacent computing campus illustrates a wider pattern in which power supply is arranged directly around large, energy-intensive digital infrastructure rather than relying solely on the wider grid. Long-term offtake commitments of this kind are central to securing the financing required for assets of this scale.
Advisers on the deal
Kirkland & Ellis fielded a multidisciplinary team spanning corporate, debt finance, tax and energy regulatory work, working alongside Bennett Jones, which provided complementary counsel to MSIP. The involvement of specialist teams across several practice areas reflects the layered nature of a large energy-infrastructure investment, combining acquisition structuring, committed financing, tax planning and sector-specific regulatory analysis.
A market shaped by digital demand
The investment sits at the intersection of two fast-moving trends: heavy institutional appetite for infrastructure assets with predictable, contracted cash flows, and the surge in electricity demand generated by data centres and computing capacity. Projects that can guarantee firm, dispatchable power to such customers are attracting significant capital, and gas-fired generation continues to feature prominently where round-the-clock supply is required. As investors, developers and operators refine partnership structures to fund and build these facilities, transactions such as the Greenlight Electricity Centre are likely to serve as reference points for how power and digital infrastructure are financed together in the years ahead, particularly across North American jurisdictions where land, gas supply and regulatory frameworks align.
