Data Centre Review, a website and magazine tracking he latest developments within the data centre industry across the UK & Ireland has written about the impact our campaign is having saying “So, rather than fight APRS, it’s time the industry just met their demands – define what a green data centre is, and stick to it. Whether that will be enough to placate the campaigners, only time will tell.”
Please do read the whole article – but here’s an extract of their analysis
“The Scottish Government has a policy where it supports ‘green data centres’, but APRS argues the term currently lacks any meaningful definition – raising the risk that projects of very different sizes and purposes are treated as broadly equivalent.
“For APRS, that distinction is central. The group is pushing ministers to draw a firmer line between data centres that support domestic and regional needs – such as cloud services, business systems and research computing – and hyperscale facilities aimed at global AI workloads, which it argues come with ‘orders of magnitude’ higher electricity demand and larger impacts on communities and land use.
“The group’s broader argument is that Scotland risks being asked to host energy-intensive infrastructure at a pace and scale that policy has not yet caught up with – particularly as the electricity system faces competing demands from electrification, industrial decarbonisation and wider economic growth ambitions.
“There’s a real risk for the data centre industry that Action to Protect Rural Scotland could become a thorn in the side of growth in the region. That’s not simply because there’s an imminent risk that Scotland will actually implement a data centre moratorium, but it’s because APRS are ensuring that they properly organise opposition to the industry, which could frustrate future planning applications – like it did in Edinburgh.
“The campaign could also have a deeper impact on the hyperscalers, with the term risking becoming shorthand for opaque, extractive and energy-hungry development in the public mind. Once that narrative takes hold, it hardens quickly into political pressure: tighter planning scrutiny, tougher conditions, slower consents and, in the worst case, calls for outright moratoria that can catch even well-designed projects in the crossfire.
“We’ve already seen how rapidly local concerns can scale when communities feel developments are happening to them rather than with them – and when critics can point to grid constraints, land take and climate targets as evidence the system is losing control.
“The industry’s challenge now is to avoid being defined by its biggest, most controversial proposals: to be clearer about purpose and benefit, more transparent on power and heat plans, and more serious about engagement – because the alternative is a planning environment where ‘data centre’ becomes a red flag before the first drawing is even submitted.
“So, rather than fight APRS, it’s time the industry just met their demands – define what a green data centre is, and stick to it. Whether that will be enough to placate the campaigners, only time will tell.”