Brian Murray of IT consultants Morse told the Sunday Herald the CRC “failed to take account of the supply chain” and could give an advantage to companies “with a large employee base oversees… and fleets of cars, vans and trucks to distribute imports”.
Mr Murray added: “We applaud the intentions of the CRC and the move to reduce carbon emissions at some of the largest, hitherto unregulated organisations in the UK. In principle there is nothing wrong with this.
“With the renewable energy initiatives we now have in place, Scotland has fast become a destination for businesses to locate energy intensive data centres.
“However, these data centres by their nature account for a large proportion of an organisation’s energy usage as there are hundreds, if not thousands, of servers being used to underpin day-to-day business operations.
“Companies will think twice about locating their data centres in Scotland and instead move them to countries that do not run schemes such as CRC.”
