(Image Credit: Jett Schwaier/CHAT News)

By Jett Schwaier, Jesse Gill

Energy back to City

Big Marble Farms to sell excess power to City of Medicine Hat’s grid

Mar 12, 2026 | 9:24 AM

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.

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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.

“Behind the fence meant that we only used the power for our own needs, and we shut the generators off when our lights were off. But that’s very inefficient to run like that; we actually were only running about 30 per cent of the time, because when our lights are off in the summertime, we didn’t need the generation, we had to shut it down.”

Big Marble Farms president and CEO Ryan Cramer said that the process started around seven years ago.

“When you look at the inception of the idea to build the greenhouse, that was going to need the power that the generators supplied the power for. So that’s a big feeling of relief for sure,” Cramer said.

DePaoli said the City of Medicine Hat and Big Marble Farms had been working through a process over that time to overcome some regulatory hurdles to make this happen.

She adds that the Alberta Minister of Affordability and Utilities, Lethbridge-East MLA Nathan Neudorf, was instrumental in enabling them and other independent power producers to connect to the grid.

“It’s been a long journey, and we’re very happy that we’re now here, because what this means for us is that we can optimize the generators,” DePaoli said.

“Turning them on and off is very hard on the machines, very hard mechanically, it’s very expensive, and we’ve had a lot more shutdowns than we should have had, had we been connected to the grid.”

Medicine Hat’s managing director of energy, land, and environment, Rochelle Pancoast, getting to this point feels great.

“It has been a long time coming. There had been some regulatory hurdles in the process that we were able to see solved provincially,” Pancoast said.

“There was some enabling legislation in 2024. We translated that into a mirrored bylaw opportunity that allowed us to move forward with Big Marble Farms. So excited to see this come to fruition.”

Pancoast adds that it is beneficial to have companies in the region, such as Big Marble Farms, flourish.

“They’re an important part of our broader business interests, and it’s great to see their growth because it drives broader ecosystem growth across that greenhouse industry, and that drives value across our region,” Pancoast said.

“It’s always great to be able to work with partners like Big Marble Farms. They have been great to work with in a way that recognizes their growth interests, as well as the unique position that the city is in with respect to our exemption status under our Electric Utilities Act.”

Cramer said that these greenhouses are high-tech operations.

“They really are amazing intensive agriculture. We’re able to produce a lot more volume of fruits and vegetables out of a smaller area because we can control all the elements. We can control the CO2 levels, the temperature, humidity, and in our case, even the light by adding supplementary light,” Cramer said.

“So it gives us high yields, and we really need the high yields to be able to pay for the expensive infrastructure that we have here as well. It’s a very competitive business. We’re competing against larger greenhouses than even us all across the country, and that’s constantly putting pressure on the price,” he added.

“We have to find new ways to innovate, new ways to become more efficient, which means producing more out of the same area, and that’s something we’ve done a very good job of finding new technology, implementing it, and it’s been successful.”

Big Marble Farms remains a community-run business, with Cramer and his father, Albert, as part of the ownership group, following their purchase of his uncle’s stake a few years ago.

“I grew up in the industry. My dad bought his first greenhouse when I was still in diapers. So I grew up picking cucumbers, walking the rows. And that was just a lifestyle for me,” Cramer said.

“It is still a lifestyle for me. I don’t think people realize that they see this business. Sometimes they think it’s become corporate when really it’s not,” he added.

“It’s still a family-run farm in all of the ways that we see a family-run farm should be. The values are all still there. And it’s the way that we manage our team here. It’s the way that we treat the people that work for us, and the community that we’re a part of as well.”