Victor Anderson calls for a ban on new data centres using fossil fuels.
The Starmer Government is very keen on data centres, seeing their spread as a way of boosting economic growth. There was a specific commitment in the Labour election manifesto to a strategy that “removes planning barriers” to data centres. But simultaneously, the Government also has ambitious targets for house building and for reducing carbon emissions. Combining all three aims is going to be very difficult; data centres have enormous requirements for both electricity and water.
This is only now becoming a political issue, as grassroots campaigns against specific data centres compare notes and discover this problem is becoming widespread. National totals for the number of data centres planned and their future total electricity and water use, are difficult to estimate. But some facts are already becoming clear.
Artificial intelligence data centres are large warehouses full of computer equipment. This equipment needs energy to run, and therefore uses electricity. The energy used heats up the equipment, which needs to be cooled down, and water is used to do that. Since the provision of electricity is far from completely decarbonised, increased pressure on energy supply is bound to increase emissions in the immediate future. Since electricity and water are needed by people living in new housing, there can be a clash in demand between data centres and new housing, meaning that new data centres could hold up the supply of new housing. The competing demand from data centres could also push up energy prices.
The patchy availability of information about current plans is holding back public debate and decision-making on this question, perhaps deliberately. We need independent monitoring of the reliability of estimates coming from the data centre developers, and some serious scrutiny from MPs. The more complete the picture becomes, the bigger the question mark hanging over the large-scale expansion of data centres, something which of course the developers and their cheerleaders in government want to avoid.
A recent report published by the International Energy Agency found, “A typical AI-focused data centre consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households, but the largest ones under construction today will consume 20 times as much. Also data centre electricity consumption is set to more than double to around 945 TWh (terawatt hours) by 2030. This is slightly more than Japan’s total electricity consumption today.’
Currently, “data centres consume an estimated 2.5% of the UK’s electricity. The National Energy System Operator expects annual electricity consumption by data centres to rise from 5 TWh today to 22 TWh by 2030.”
Other regions with lots of data centres are seeing similar, or even higher, demands on their energy grids. In the US, a study for the Department of Energy (DOE) predicted that data centres could use up to 12% of the country’s electricity by 2028, up from 4.4% today. In Ireland, which is home to the European headquarters of some major US technology companies, a fifth of annual energy demand comes from data centres. In the Dublin area, data centres were responsible for 48% of electricity consumption in 2023.”
In light of these overall estimates, the UK Government should be pressed to provide detailed information about each planned or proposed data centre’s requirements for energy. It is also important to have information about the UK’s external footprint, with centres to feed UK data consumption said to be planned overseas, particularly for a location in India.
The impact of data centres on electricity demand would be less of an issue if the world wasn’t already in a climate crisis. Although the scale of action to combat and cope with climate change is still inadequate, there is useful action being taken in many countries, including the UK push for electric vehicles and the expansion of offshore wind. The problem we have now is that these worthwhile developments could easily be outweighed by the impact of data centres. Pursuing their expansion on the basis of fossil fuels is not a serious option in a worsening climate crisis.
There are obviously many other, and better-publicised, problems about AI, including at the most basic level the accuracy and reliability of the “information” it comes up with. Regulation is needed, and that should include regulations concerning energy requirements.
Technological innovation should be able to produce less energy-intensive data centres, or alternatively, their owners or governments could ensure that all of them are run only on renewable energy, which many already are. That would be a very different situation, but it will only come about if there is a ban on all new data centres using fossil fuels. Our tech overlords would paint that as an “extremist” position. But it will be essential if we are to have any chance of limiting the growing instability of the climate.