APRS News
We signed a letter sent from Stop Climate Chaos Scotland (SCCS) to the Public Finance Minister Hannah Mary Goodlad to call for formal consultation on gudiance and a public conversation on the issue of hyperscale AI data centres and for the Government to make clear their policy on data centre decisions. This letter comes after the Scottish Parliament voted for a pause on decisions until planning gudiance and a strategic approach are in place.
European Campaigners today launched their Days of Action to Stop Dirty Data Centres. Scotland will be participating in the Day of Action with a March in Edinburgh on Saturday 14th November – more information to follow!
With the energy price cap going up today and news that bills will be rising for households this winter, we calculated that the AI Growth zone electricity subsidies mean that the current site plus extension would get subsidies of £6.7 million a year when complete, and the whole AI growth zone which is planned to be 500MW, when constructed, would get a subsidy of over £80 million a year.
The proposal is for a 1000MW capacity hyperscale data centre on fields north of the decommissioned nuclear power station at Chapelcross, Dumfries and Galloway. The documents are available on the Dumfries and Galloway Planning Portal 26/1649/PIP
The Economy Energy and Tourism Committee heard from a NESO official who said that there was 9.7GW of data centre demand in the grid queue in Scotland and 30 projects. This was a bit of a revelation, given that until now, the only measure of data centres in the pipeline in Scotland has been the 7.3GW that we have documented in our data centre map. An article in the National has taken some of our research about NESO and the grid queue and spoken to Dr Callum McIvor who also gave evidence at the Parliamentary Committee.
This article was written for the Business section of the Herald as part of their series on hyperscale data centres. It lays out the implications of the vote and the changes to EIA requirements from Wednesday 16th September
Anne Alexander, researcher and freelance journalist explains what the US, Ireland and Slough tell us about the impact of data centre clusters on our electricity system and the size of the speculative boom in Scotland. Slough, the data centre capital of Europe, two decades in the making, has a capacity of 413MW, two thirds that of just one data centre in Scotland, the Auchtertool proposal and less than half that proposed at Chapelcross.
When asked during General Parliamentary Questions on 17 September about plans to produce planning and environmental guidance for artificial intelligence
The APRS Petition at the Scottish Parliament is now over 25,000 signatures and is due to be heard in the committee on 8th October. The Scottish Government have published their response to the petition and Scottish Parliament Information Service have published a briefing