3 GW is roughly three quarters of the country's peak demand, says Foxglove
New datacenters planned in Scotland would collectively require 75 percent as much energy as the entire country currently consumes, according to tech campaign group Foxglove.
The nonprofit says its research [PDF] indicates that 11 hyperscale bit barns planned for construction across Scotland (bit bothies?) would require a total of 2,000 to 3,000 MW of electricity to operate, while the current peak demand for the country is 4 gigawatts (4,000 MW).
Foxglove states that it compiled this information simply by searching through local authority planning websites during November for applications, so it may not include other facilities that developers are planning to build but have not yet submitted an application for approval.
Not all the developers list the expected capacity of their datacenters once operational, so the researchers used an estimate of 250 MW each for the three facilities planned by developer ILI Group and another by Apatura.
All of the others fell between 200 and 300 MW, with the exception of the 550 MW campus at Ravenscraig in North Lanarkshire to be built by Apatura.
The total for all these planned facilities comes to roughly 3 GW, which means that the total energy consumed in Scotland could dramatically increase if they are all built.
According to the website of the National Energy System Operator (NESO), responsible for managing and planning the UK's electricity and gas networks, Scotland's current winter peak gross demand is just over 4GW, and the agency expects this to remain below 5 GW by 2030 across all future energy scenarios.
This latter figure would seem to be at odds with the expected 75 percent increase implied by Foxglove's research, so we asked NESO if it was aware of the planned datacenter projects, but it had not responded by the time of publication.
For those concerned that bit barns might starve Scottish users of electricity, fear not. According to NESO, the generation capacity in Scotland today is just under 20GW, and this is set to more than double by 2030.
But if Foxglove's figures are correct, over 40 percent of energy consumption in Scotland will be accounted for by datacenters – trumping even Ireland's situation, where bit barns gobble more than 20 percent of the electricity supply.
What concerns Foxglove is all the extra greenhouse gases likely to be emitted by those datacenters. Just one of the 11 facilities planned would cause emissions comparable with those of Edinburgh airport, it says, citing figures from the developer.
The organization's director of advocacy, Donald Campbell, said: "It is worrying that this vast expansion of polluting datacenters is receiving the backing of both the Scottish and UK governments, with little apparent thought for the consequences. Ministers need to ensure the public isn't left to foot the bill for the environmental costs racked up by some of the richest companies on the planet."
Estimating emissions from the datacenters is difficult, since few developers have volunteered this information. But according to NESO, generation of energy from fossil fuels in Scotland is expected to reach zero sometime between 2035 and 2040 as energy from renewable sources rises to replace it.
It should therefore follow that the new facilities will also be emitting zero greenhouse gases by then, if they are powered from the grid. That still leaves 10 to 15 years of potential emissions in the meantime, however.
This research comes just weeks after the UK government's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology outlined plans to offer discounts on energy for datacenter operators prepared to locate their projects in Scotland and the north of England, closer to sources of renewable power.
According to NESO, Scotland has vast natural resources, and it forecasts a big increase in renewable-generated electricity within the country. But the grid transmission system needs upgrading to deliver the power where it is needed.
With generation capacity far exceeding demand, Scotland may be able to export power into England with those grid updates, except during periods of prolonged low wind, where the reverse may occur. ®