No power plant for Bell AI centre in RM of Sherwood, says interim reeve

The RM of Sherwood’s interim reeve, as of Friday, didn’t expect a 900MW power plant will be built at the Bell AI data centre site.

This week, the RM started the process to possibly approve the expansion plan for the centre. The RM council passed the first reading of bylaws to rezone land from agricultural to light industrial, and to amend the official community plan.

The plans filed with the RM showed there’s a conditional sale for about 895 acres of land east and south of the current data centre site for the expansion and quadrupling of the first phase of the project.

For the first phase, Bell will be plugging into Saskatchewan’s power grid, but under the provincial government’s new guidelines, Bell will have to provide its own power for the expansion. So it will have to build a 900MW power plant, and Bell has indicated it’s expected to run on natural gas.

The documents only said the plant would be built “at a location further from Regina,” but Ray Orb, the RM’s interim reeve, said the power plant won’t be built in the RM at all.

“A power plant of that size would probably take up a lot more space, and I don’t think that will be in the cards, not in the RM of Sherwood,” he said.

He didn’t think a site had been identified for the plant yet, but believed it would be in a more remote area, away from population centres.

The process

Orb said on Friday that they were still in the really preliminary part of the application process with Bell

“There are a lot of things that need to be done before the expansion is approved,” said Orb.

He said a series of advertisements and public notices will go out soon, and a schedule for public consultations was expected to be published the week of Oct. 12. He couldn’t say who would be invited to the public consultations or when they would be held.

“We have had contact from quite a few people that had sent submissions in, and we are looking at those; we’ve been looking at those all along for the last while,” he explained.

Bell will be involved in the public consultations, and Orb said the company has already been conducting its own consultations about the expansion.

Construction on the Bell AI data centre outside Regina. on Oct. 1, 2026. (Lisa Schick/980 CJME)

The process will be the same as was done for the first phase of the project, but Orb thought it would be more lengthy this time around with more openness to hearing from more people.

“In the end, I think people will get the chance to voice their concerns and the RM will consider all of the requests that we have and, I think, in the end it will be well-received by the general public,” said Orb.

He believes most of the negativity about the project is coming from outside of the RM.

“There’s really not a lot of negativity in the RM; I think it’s coming from outside people, probably around the province, maybe even some people outside the province,” he explained.

The meeting on Wednesday was held virtually, but Orb said he believes going forward the general meetings and consultations will be held in person.

Upcoming election

In March, the RM of Sherwood’s reeve and three councillors resigned, leaving the council without a quorum and therefore without the ability to make decisions.

A few weeks later, the Ministry of Government Relations appointed three new councillors and a reeve to serve in an interim capacity.

As the controversy surrounding the data centre grew, that led to some speculating those councillors’ ties to government may have influenced their decisions around the data centre.

On Nov. 9, municipal elections will be held across the province, and all of the vacant seats in the RM of Sherwood will be filled.

Only one person has stepped forward to be the reeve — Carl Husum — and has been acclaimed to the position. Husum has served on the RM council previously.

Christopher Reynolds has also been acclaimed and will keep his Division 4 councillor seat.

Jeff Poissant has been acclaimed to the Division 6 seat. He’s both served on the RM’s council previously and was elected reeve in 2015. A recording he made in 2016 of a meeting with Tim Probe was used as evidence in Probe’s breach of trust trial — Probe was eventually found not guilty of the charge.

By mid-November, the RM’s council will be entirely publicly elected once again, but Orb couldn’t say which decisions the current council or the incoming council will be called on to make about the data centre expansion.