The City of Medicine Hat will now purchase surplus electricity from Big Marble Farms after the greenhouse officially connected its generators to the city's power grid. A ribbon-cutting ceremony marked the milestone on Wednesday, allowing the 55-acre greenhouse to export excess power from its 12-megawatt on-site cogeneration system.
The generators run on natural gas and capture waste heat to help warm the greenhouse. Until now, Big Marble could only generate electricity for its own use and had to shut the generators down when demand dropped. New provincial legislation passed in 2024 made it possible for facilities like Big Marble to sell extra power back to the grid.
Big Marble Farms director Anna DePaoli said that when owners had a vision to expand the facility from 35 to 55 acres, there wasn't enough power available, and construction of a future City of Medicine Hat substation had not yet begun.
"We wanted to go ahead and supply our customers with the needed volume of product to expand; we just had to do something," DePaoli said.
"We started to investigate cogeneration, using natural gas to generate power. We started with six megawatts initially, phase one, and then we added another six megawatts of power, and initially this was in a behind-the-fence configuration," she added.
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