By Dr Kat Jones, director of APRS, a member of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland
We only need to look across the Atlantic for a taste of what’s to come as Scotland and the UK are deluged by a wave of applications to construct scores of new data centres, with some proposed ‘hyperscale’ developments requiring as much energy as half a million homes.
Data centres are causing an energy crisis in parts of the US, with 13 states on the brink of rolling blackouts due to data centre energy pressure on the grid. Residents in the areas with data centres have soaring bills due to the enormous strain on the transmission network, and in Ohio the grid watchdog has said there should be a moratorium on new connections for data centres. On top of that, many developments are deploying polluting gas or diesel generators to ensure constancy of power supplies.
The Scottish Government’s recently published draft Climate Change Plan (CCP), which lays out the policies and pathway to 2040 for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, has a strong section on increased production of electricity from renewable sources. This is important both to replace residual fossil fuel use (like the gas plant at Peterhead) and, in due course, aging nuclear stations, but also to provide for rising demand as heating, transport and industry are increasingly electrified. It includes some actions to help reduce demand for energy.
However, it is notable that the largest source of likely energy demand is not mentioned in the climate change plan: data centres. The Scottish Government has been marketing Scotland as a location for data centres since a 2021 action plan. But now, with an energy crunch in the US caused by power-hungry data centres, and powerful grass roots campaigns successfully opposing them, American companies are looking elsewhere for the power and water they need to expand capacity.
Photo credit: Taylor Vick
A look at Scotland’s planning portals shows that data centres with the energy capacity of nearly one and a half times the entire peak power demand of Scotland are going through planning processes right now. Yes, you read that correctly. And this could just be the tip of the iceberg.
Only one of the sites touted in that 2021 action plan has so far actually reached the planning permission stage. There could be many, many more coming.
Of course, all of the proposed developments in planning couldn’t go ahead due to the vast amounts of energy required – they just would not get the grid connections. But there are indications that 1GW-2GW of data centre demand are likely to be built in the UK. Even this is vast – it would increase our energy use by 25% to 50%, which makes a mockery of attempts that other industries, businesses and individuals are making to improve efficiency and reduce energy use. Scotland’s current winter peak gross demand is just over 4GW.
Importantly, data centres are not well suited for being powered by renewables because they need constant power 24/7. Although data centres could reduce constraint payments – paid to wind farms to turn off turbines when the wind is blowing and there is not enough capacity in the transmission grid to export the energy out of Scotland – they will rely on energy imported from elsewhere. This is likely to be from fossil fuels.
Many data centres are building batteries on-site to provide back-up, but these are generally designed to store energy for a maximum of four hours – most have just two hours of storage. This could bridge the times of day when prices peak (around teatime) but they will not cover energy requirements for the hours and days when there is a lack of wind. That needs long-duration storage: pumped-hydro, hydrogen and such like, which is expensive to build and are needed to help balance the grid for the rest of Scotland’s economy.
Data centres will make it far harder to meet our energy targets for renewables. With Torness nuclear power station – which gives a constant baseload of 1.12GW – due to close in 2028, now is precisely the wrong time to be adding inflexible energy-guzzlers into our system.
The renewable energy being created in Scotland is already spoken for. It is part of the decarbonisation efforts of the whole UK. This is why transmission connectors are being built to transport energy to England.
The crisis in the US as a harbinger of what is to come to Scotland if we allow these centres to be built. There is not enough production of gas turbines in the world to keep pace with the demand from data centres, which are increasingly building power generation capacity on site (bring your own power, or BYOP, as it is known) due to strain on the grid.
Energy bills have sky-rocketed for consumers, diesel back-up generators are being run as a matter of course, rather than in extreme emergencies, and retired nuclear power is being brought back into operation. Jet engines from old airliners are even being used due to demand for turbines outstripping supply.
The same will happen here unless the Scottish Government and local authority planning committees have the foresight to properly consider and manage the issue.
A parliament committee is meeting to discuss the energy section of the CCP today. And Edinburgh City Council is shortly due to discuss an application for a hyperscale data centre at the Gyle, on the west side of the city. This application has been able to progress without an Environmental Impact Assessment (as have five out of eight others which have reached this stage in planning), and this is despite a plan to build diesel back-up generation just upwind of the city centre.
It is vital that the Scottish Government’s new CCP takes into account the serious impact that building hyperscale data centres will have on Scotland’s climate ambitions and its citizens.