Scotland needs a moratorium on new data centres
Scotland is currently facing a wave of speculative hyper-scale data centre planning applications. With 24 proposals for major new sites in Scotland, if all are approved they will consume up to 6000 megawatts of power - more than 1.5 times Scotland’s total peak power use now.
Within limits, data centres are an essential part of modern infrastructure. But at a time of rising energy prices and stalled climate action, an unplanned expansion could have huge impacts on both people and planet, and the huge scale of expansion is mostly about enriching giant AI companies.
With hundreds of megawatts of renewable electricity diverted from homes to hyperscale data centres, all our efforts to transition to renewables could be undone by the huge strain placed on our energy system.
Communities around the world have experienced energy price rises as a direct result of similar developments, and three London boroughs have had to put a freeze on house building plans because of the impact of data centres on local grid connection.
The work to develop Scotland’s last planning update was carried out in 2022, prior to the public launch of ChatGPT and before the acceleration of the global AI industry. It’s clear we need an urgent update, to ensure planning is co-ordinated at a national level and we are protecting the environment and the energy system from the impact of new data centres.
Thanks to our campaign, we have forced the Scottish Government to act. In August, they announced that Councils must tell Scottish Ministers about all data centre applications over 50MW. And they intervened in two applications in Fife and Edinburgh, mandating that environmental impact assessments must be done.
But this falls far short of what we need. It will not actually pause or prevent a single hyperscale data centre from being approved. It has still not defined what a so-called ‘green’ data centre is. And the Scottish Government still hasn’t given local Councils the guidance they need to make decisions on these proposals.
We still need an urgent moratorium on new large scale data centres, until the Scottish Government can put in place updated planning guidance, including a definition of what constitutes supposed ‘green’ data centres, and requiring an Environmental Impact Assessment as standard.
Thousands of people have already made their voices heard. Join us in writing today to the First Minister to demand an urgent pause on hyperscale AI data centres in Scotland.