On a grey Thursday morning at Holyrood, members of the Scottish Parliament’s Climate Action Committee sat down to hear two very different stories about the future of data centres in Scotland. On one side stood the technology industry, eager to paint these vast, humming buildings as a natural fit for a cool, windy nation already blessed with more renewable energy than it knows what to do with. On the other side stood academics and sustainability experts, warning that the same digital boom that powers artificial intelligence, cloud computing and streaming services could swallow the country’s clean electricity at the exact moment Scotland is trying to electrify everything from cars to home heating. At the heart of the debate was a simple, human question: what will all this mean for our energy bills, our landscapes and our ability to live up to the promises we have made to the planet? The committee heard that Scotland has an “overabundant” supply of renewable energy, so much so that billions of pounds are paid each year to switch wind turbines off because the grid simply cannot absorb all the power they generate. That sounds like an argument in favour of building data centres here: use the wasted electrons, put them to work. But the reality is more complicated, because the electricity that data centres need is not always generated at the same time or in the same place, and because the rush to build them is happening alongside a much bigger push to decarbonise transport, heating and industry. The meeting was, in many ways, a collision between optimism and caution, with the future of Scotland’s energy system hanging in the balance.
The technology sector’s main witness, Craig Melson, associate director of the trade body techUK, tried to calm fears by calling much of the public concern “misinformation”. He told MSPs that claims data centres will push up household energy bills are simply wrong, at least in Scotland’s case. “Some of this misinformation, whether it’s ‘oh they’re going to put our power bills up’ – well it won’t,” he said. He acknowledged that this has happened in parts of North America, but insisted Scotland is different. He argued that the country’s cooler climate makes it a natural home for data centres, which generate enormous amounts of heat and need to be cooled around the clock. Rather than being a burden, he suggested, these facilities could become part of the local economy, creating jobs and attracting investment. But he also stressed that developers need to do a better job of bringing communities along, comparing a data centre to an A-road: “You wouldn’t want to put an A-road through a town without working with the town and making sure everything’s mitigated, and indeed if that’s a good thing to do or not.” He said it is in the commercial interest of data centre owners to keep water and energy usage low, because every wasted megawatt is money out of their pockets. Even so, he admitted that the industry has “struggled” with growing concern from councils and residents who worry about the visual impact, noise, water use and the sheer scale of these buildings. His message was essentially: don’t panic, but do engage, because these are serious pieces of infrastructure that deserve proper scrutiny.
Andrew Weir, chief executive of ScotlandIS, the country’s digital technology industry body, offered a slightly more cautious tone. He said he could not “guarantee” that consumers would never see higher energy bills because of data centres, but he reminded MSPs that “there are many more factors to energy bills” than the arrival of a few large warehouses full of servers. He also made an intriguing point: the construction of data centres could actually help fund renewable projects, because they provide a reliable, large-scale customer for clean power. In theory, that could mean more wind farms and solar arrays, not fewer, and possibly lower costs for everyone in the long run. But the economics are not straightforward. The committee heard that the UK’s electricity prices are among the highest in the world, which makes it a difficult place to run energy-hungry facilities. Melson gave a stark example: a 100-megawatt facility, roughly the size of a hyperscale data centre, could face an energy bill of more than £200 million in the UK. The same facility in Sweden would cost around £60 million, and in America around £50 million. That is a massive competitive disadvantage, and it raises the question of why so many companies are queuing up to build data centres in Scotland at all. Melson suggested that some of the proposed projects may not be entirely serious. He told MSPs that companies are “trying it on” and submitting duplicate planning applications because they fear some will be rejected. This means the number of data centres in the pipeline is “artificially inflated”, and the true scale of future demand may be far smaller than the headlines suggest.
Then came the counterweight. Dr Alejandro Gallego Schmid, a sustainability expert from the University of Manchester, delivered a sobering reality check. He told the committee that the combined nine gigawatts of capacity for data centres currently in Scotland’s planning pipeline would consume nine times the electricity of every household in Scotland combined. Let that sink in: nine times. That is not a small addition to the grid; it is a transformation. And it comes at precisely the wrong time, because Scotland is trying to decarbonise everything at once. Homes are moving from gas boilers to heat pumps, cars are moving from petrol to electric, and industry is trying to shift away from fossil fuels. All of those changes will require huge amounts of clean electricity. Dr Gallego Schmid used a simple and powerful metaphor: “We have a cake and we have to see how are we going to divide that cake.” If data centres take the biggest slice, there may not be enough left for the rest of the country’s net zero ambitions. He did not say data centres are inherently bad, but he insisted that Scotland cannot treat them as an unlimited opportunity without thinking carefully about the trade-offs. The same renewable energy that could power a data centre could also power a bus fleet, a steel plant or a thousand heat pumps. The question is not whether we can generate enough clean electricity, but whether we can generate enough to do everything at once, and who gets to decide the priorities.
Professor Wim Vanderbauwhede, from the University of Glasgow, went even further. He pointed out that if Scotland did not build any data centres, it would clearly have an excess of renewables for meeting its decarbonisation targets. But that surplus would not last long, because most of the renewable energy being built will be needed to decarbonise transport and heating. “Actually, we will need most of the renewable energy to decarbonise transport and heating,” he said. “So that capacity being built will not be largely available for powering data centres unless it goes at the expense of those other purposes.” In other words, every megawatt fed into a data centre is a megawatt that cannot be used to clean up the way we travel, heat our homes or run our factories. He advised the Scottish Government to cap data centres at 500 megawatts of total capacity, warning that anything larger would be “highly problematic for many reasons”. That is a far cry from the nine gigawatts currently in the pipeline. A cap would mean Scotland could still host some data centres, enough to benefit from the digital economy, but not so many that they crowd out the country’s climate commitments. It would also send a signal to developers that Scotland is not simply open for business at any cost. The contrast between the industry’s optimism and the academics’ caution could not be sharper. One side sees data centres as a golden opportunity to use surplus renewable energy, create jobs and attract investment. The other sees a threat to the very transition that makes that renewable energy valuable in the first place.
So where does this leave ordinary people? The truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. Data centres are not necessarily the villains they are sometimes made out to be. They are essential to the modern world: every email, every video call, every AI chatbot, every online bank transaction relies on a data centre somewhere. Scotland’s cool climate and abundant wind genuinely make it an attractive location, and the industry has a point when it says that fears about household bills may be overstated. But the experts also have a point. The scale of the proposed build-out is enormous, and the timing is awkward. Scotland cannot simply assume that its renewable surplus will be large enough to power everything, especially when the country is also trying to electrify transport and heating. The “cake” is not infinite. The committee will now have to weigh all of this evidence and decide what advice to give the Scottish Government. Should there be a cap on data centre capacity? Should planning rules be tightened to require data centres to prove they will not undermine net zero targets? Should they be encouraged to use waste heat to warm homes and businesses? Should they be required to store energy or to use only renewable power? These are the kinds of decisions that will shape Scotland’s energy future for decades. In the meantime, the rest of us are left with a familiar feeling: the future is arriving faster than we can plan for it, and the choices we make today will determine whether that future is a blessing or a burden. The committee hearing was a small but important step in making those choices visible, and in reminding us that behind every abstract statistic about megawatts and gigawatts, there are real people trying to keep their homes warm, their lights on and their hopes for a greener world alive.