Today The National published an article about the companies which are planning to build hyperscale AI data centres in Scotland. Outlined the business models of land speculation and that just two companies are proposing, between them, data centres which, if built, would double Scotland’s peak energy demand.
Our Statement on The National’s Article.
It is really concerning that two companies who seem to specialise in planning, not data centres, have proposed 11 of the 16 hyperscale data centres that are in the planning system in Scotland. These eleven projects, which are mostly on green field and green belt sites, have a power demand over 4000MW which, if they were in operation, would double Scotland’s peak energy demand.
Apatura and ILI have grown extremely rapidly, through their success in getting planning permission for battery storage which has massively increased the value of the land involved. Since the Scottish Government has never turned down an application for battery storage (as we showed in our in-depth Battery Storage Report) this has presumably not been much of a challenge.
These two companies are evidently planning to do the same with their hyperscale data centres, while using the grid connections secured for their battery developments to jump the queue on demand connections.
The incoming Scottish Government will need to get a grip on this conveyor belt by which companies that are clever with the Scottish planning system can make huge amounts of money speculating on Green Belt and greenfield land for battery storage and then lever yet more land value uplift by proposing a hyperscale data centre. All this comes at the expense of Scotland’s energy security, grid stability, countryside and climate targets.
As a countryside charity we have been working on Green Belts for decades and these companies are cynically exploiting our National Planning Framework to put developments that cover hundreds of acres of countryside with industrial buildings. Our planning framework has a central aim of delivering for climate and for nature but these hyperscale data centres will ride roughshod over both.
This is becoming a real issue for the upcoming elections and it is increasingly clear that a priority for the incoming Scottish Government will be to examine what size of data centre would actually serve Scotland’s needs, rather than the demands of US big tech giants to train their AI large language models.
Watch the podcasts highlighted in the article
With thanks to Lisa Beacham of the Hurlford data Centre Campaign (Ayrshire major development community group) and another campaigner for spotting the podcasts with Apatura and ILI which form part of the story here.
This is the training session the Scottish Government arranged for planners from local authorities on ‘green data centres’. There was no analysis and advice from Scottish Government on what a green data centre is but it was a 30 minute presentation from Apatura’s Head of Planning and Head of Commercial followed by 5 minutes from an officer at SEPA.
Extract: how battery storage helps hyperscale data centres jump the grid queue
“So the hyperscalers have come to Scotland for example and they’ve been looking to try and get into the power market and they’ve realized they can’t bully NESO and then Scottish Power to get connections. They’re like ‘Get to the back of the queue mate it’s 2040 and log your own connection application”……”They need a Demand connection so they’ve been after battery assets so the battery, by virtue the way that National Grid used to model batteries 2-3 years ago they model batteries as 100% import 100% exports assets. So they have that 100% import they would just what they’re after but it needs to be turned into what we call a Final Demand Connection for a data centre.”
More on being approached by the hyperscalers
“And then out the blue, really, we started getting interest in our power connections from the data centre world which, again, if you go back to what I talked about before, the interest there was in acquiring our connections for the data centres.”
Modification Applications
“The battery connection’s there. We’ve applied to national grid to have these grid connections, something called Mod App, a modification application, to make it into a co-located battery and final demand connection. So it means it can serve the data centre but is also a battery”
Extract 2: “Every connection we applied for we were successful with”
Short Extract from the ‘Real Assets, Real Leaders’ podcast