Today APRS, Scotland’s Countryside Charity, launched a petition calling on the Scottish Government to make Environmental Impact Assessments compulsory for data centres and to issue strict standards for energy efficiency and water use.
Data centres use huge amounts of energy and water – a recent proposal for a data centre in Edinburgh is reported to require power equivalent to that used by more than half a million homes, the population of Glasgow and Edinburgh combined and plans for a 1GW site in Irving, Ayrshire will have an energy demand twice the maximum capacity of Whitelees, the UK’s biggest onshore windfarm.
The developers of the Edinburgh data centre have been told that they will not be required to draw up an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as part of the planning process. This is because it has been screened out as unnecessary by the Local Authority.
Environmental Impact Assessments are required for major infrastructure developments and lay out all the environmental impacts in one place so that decision makers can make an informed decision. However APRS have been seeing applications for data centres and large battery storage installations being screened out of requiring EIAs.
In the case of battery storage, we have looked at 76 battery storage installations that have been granted planning permission and only 7 have been required to do an EIA.
The lack of a requirement for EIA is concerning because the scale of energy requirements for data centres mean that they have a disproportionately high impact on the environment, and because battery storage is going in on greenfield and Green Belt sites with high biodiversity.
APRS are calling on the Scottish Government to ensure that data centres and large battery storage installations are named in Schedule 1 of the EIA regulations so they no longer fall through the net, and that data centres should be subject to strict energy efficiency and water use standards.
You can sign our Petition to add your voice to this call below.
Kat Jones, Director of APRS said
“AI, and the data centres they require, demand a mind-boggling amount of energy, and there is a real risk that new renewables capacity will be diverted to data centres, rather than to delivering the UKs climate targets. It is really unbelievable that EIAs are not being required for all data centre developments, so decision makers are not getting the full picture of the environmental impacts.
“We need our renewable energy resources to replace fossil fuels in our economy and not be diverted to powering AI.
“Renewable energy is not without impacts on the environment, and communities, so we need to also be looking at how we are as efficient as possible in our energy use. With a single data centre using the equivalent energy of all households in a city, this is taking us at full speed in the opposite direction.
“We believe that, due to their extremely high power requirements and water requirements, data centres should be on Schedule 1 of the EIA regulations, so that they always require an EIA. We are also calling on the Government to require environmental impact assessments for large Battery Storage developments due to their impacts on Green Belt and green field sites.”
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Find out more about Data Centres and Environmental Impact Assessment
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.More on Data Centres
Data centres currently use about 2.5% of UK electricity, with demand projected to rise sharply to as much as 71 TWh by 2050, driven by AI expansion. Scotland could host up to 20% of future capacity due to lower land costs, and the Scottish Government currently has an action plan to encourage data centres
Globally, data centres are straining energy systems. In Ireland, they use over 20% of national electricity, projected to rise to 32% by 2026. Similar pressures in Spain and the US have led to higher consumer energy prices and water shortages. Studies warn that rising data centre demand risks offsetting renewable gains and undermining net-zero goals, with European energy use from data centres potentially growing by 287TWh by 2030 – the equivalent of Spain’s total electricity consumption.
Read the full Briefing here
Data Centre Briefing
This is a short briefing on data centres including he situation in Scotland, the UK and further afield, energy requirements and impact on energy prices and targets for net zero.
More information about EIA Regulations
Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) are carried out when there is major infrastructure planned to give a complete overview of the impacts so that decision makers can decide whether it should go ahead and, if so, with what conditions.
The decision on whether an EIA is required depends on whether the development is on Schedule 1 (all listed types of development require EIAs) or Schedule 2 (which require an EIA ‘if they are likely to have a significant effect on the environment, due to factors such as their size, nature or location’).
In order to decide whether a development which is under Schedule 2 requires an EIA the planning authority will refer to information provided by the developer. We do not think that this is adequate and we believe that, due to their impacts on energy and water, they should be on Schedule 1.
The Scottish Government website says: ‘Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a means of drawing together, in a systematic way, an assessment of the likely significant environmental effects arising from a proposed development. All developments falling within a description in Schedule 1 to the 2017 EIA Regulations require EIA. Developments of a type listed in Schedule 2 to the 2017 EIA Regulations will require EIA if they are likely to have a significant effect on the environment, due to factors such as their size, nature or location.’
Battery Storage and EIAs
We looked at whether EIAs had been required in consents for Battery Storage. We looked at 56 planning consents from Energy Consents Unit (for installations between 50 MW and 1000MW) and 20 from Local Authorities (all at 49.9MW). We found that only 7 of the 76 installations had been required to do an EIA. The sizes of the seven installations where EIAs had been required were 50MW (2) 500MW (4) and 900MW (1).
About the Edinburgh Application
Documents relating to the Gogarburn data centre application are on the Edinburgh City Planning Portal. You can access the Application for planning permission in principle, the documents related to the EIA screening, and the energy and sustainability statement, which gives the amount of energy that the data centre would use.
In Shelborn Drummond’s Request for an EIA screening opinion which outlines environmental impacts, they make no mention of water use and energy use of the energy centre.
There are many other applications for data centres in the pipeline in Scotland including a 1GW site in Irving, Ayrshire which is expected to scale to one of the biggest data centres in Europe. This energy demand is twice as much as the maximum capacity of Whitelees, the UK’s biggest onshore windfarm.
You can view a shortlist and a longlist of potential data centre sites from the Scottish Government’s Action Plan.
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