On Monday, the UK shuttered its last coal-fired power station, and last week the Labour government announced its support for a £10bn investment by Blackstone into a vast new (artificial intelligence) AI data centre in Blyth.
At first glance the two seem unrelated. One is a dirty relic of a bygone age and the other appears to be a clean, modern springboard into a digital future. But these decisions both illustrate the growing complexities of the green transition.
Data has often been called the ‘new oil’, due to its apparent value and importance to contemporary society. The analogy also works in terms of data’s potential to become the contentious focus of the next wave of climate debate, however.
As the world seeks to decarbonise and reduce energy use, data centres are the unobtrusive outliers, their need to be kept cool chewing through vast amounts of electricity. Not as striking as dark plumes over power stations or as visually arresting as the scars of deforestation, they are instead quietly housed in nondescript buildings, out of sight and deliberately out of mind.
Data centres’ proponents will say they can be as green as the energy that supplies them, so with the right renewables mix there should be no issue. So why then, is the sector still ripe for a reputational shock as part of our increasingly polarised climate change discourse?
Firstly, the sheer amount of energy data centres need now and into the future is – ironically – hard to compute. Studies have suggested the AI industry alone could consume as much energy as a country like the Netherlands by 2027.
This is because even our most mundane activities feed the data beast. Every photo, email newsletter or PDF we share ends up being stored in the cloud. By ‘cloud’, we really mean a physical server rack, sitting in a warehouse, likely in Ireland – the EU’s data centre capital. As The Atlantic vividly put it, every time you post to Instagram, you’re turning on a light bulb forever.
This is impacting leading tech companies’ climate change targets, bringing with it a looming reputational threat. According to Google’s most recent environmental report, its emissions rose by 49% over the past five years and 13% in 2023 alone, due to the increasing amount of energy required by its data centres, an appetite amplified by the growth of AI services, which use significantly more computer power than other activity.
In July this year, AI data centre emissions were cited as being part of the reason Microsoft was one of over 200 companies to have its net zero target removed by the Science Based Targets initiative. This drew a terse statement from the technology giant.
As renewable generation sources are often intermittent, the always-on demand of data centres is a headache for grid and corporate operators alike.
Microsoft’s recent announcement that one reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station – closed in 2019 – will be restarted exclusively to power its AI operations shows how business-critical the pursuit of power (preferably low-carbon) has become. The 800 megawatts of electricity produced could power the equivalent of around 160,000 homes each year.
This comparison is designed to help people understand industry terms, but it also presents an additional communications challenge. It gives a false sense of an either/or decision when it comes to this electricity – either homes get it, or the data centre gets it.
Data centre users and operators must therefore be more proactive about their power plans and demonstrating how they will be good neighbours. Renewable energy projects have paved the way for communities to ask legitimate questions about the benefits being promised by developments in their backyards. Employment numbers for datacentres vary hugely, but in some cases this will drive only marginal gains for local people.
Some work is being done in the benefit space, with initiatives like bee-friendly planting on data centre campuses in Ireland and data centre providers leading training for young people in Heathrow. These vary hugely, though, and risk being seen to lack in depth.
With definitive community benefit guidance for offshore windfarms still snarled up with the UK and Scottish governments, it would be refreshing to see governments expedite thinking on community contributions associated with data centres, and bringing creativity to bear too.
Surely, with the right discussions, there is a way local enterprises in somewhere like Blyth could tap into the vast computing power on their doorstep at a reduced or nominal cost?
Societies are often defined by what they leave behind. Even if we aren’t bequeathing the next generation the fire and fury of coal power plants, the carbon legacy of the data accumulating around us like a medieval midden needs urgent attention.