This column appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.
Another month, another multi-billion pound giant data centre announcement, this one at Blackdog, north of Aberdeen. And each time the biggest question we need to ask is where the energy is going to come from?
At Blackdog two sources for the 'multi-giga-watt' power it may need are being discussed across the media. One is offshore wind, the other (not proposed by the developers themselves) whether it may need gas generation on site. Both raise questions around what mix of technology, AI and energy we want to see in a future Scotland.
That renewables are necessary at Blackdog has been made clear by Steven McGarva, managing director of developer Ashfield Land, who described data centres as “power hungry” and Blackdog as “inextricably linked to Scotland’s renewable energy rollout.”
Henry Sutton, director of TechRE, a partner in the project also extolled, “It has access to three gigawatts of renewably generated wind energy, significant grid connections and the ability to bring international subsea cables straight to its door.”
This, he described, “makes it attractive to the world’s biggest AI names looking to develop large data centre campuses that are well connected globally, have lots of redundant power available, and a desire to utilise renewable energy.”
Dr Kat Jones of Action to Protect Rural Scotland, however, pointed out: "The developers of these hyperscale data centres know that they cannot run on renewables alone and so this announcement will need vast amounts of fossil fuel generation to run. Hyperscale data centres cannot dial up and down demand and so when the wind is not blowing they need to bring in energy from somewhere.”
She observed that if the Blackdog campus was set to consume 'multi-gigawatts', this single development "would have the electricity demand of half the entire Scottish economy."
READ MORE:
- Report says UK data centre job claims ‘ludicrously inflated’ | The Herald
- ‘Green’ data centres could derail Scotland’s net-zero plans
- Edinburgh's AI boom: Is the impact of data centres being overlooked?
- Ravenscraig steel works could become UK's biggest AI hub
Of course, data centres represent a possible use for surplus energy – when the grid can’t take an excess of wind power, which otherwise might be curtailed. But let's also not forget that the energy could have other uses, nor the sheer scale of its consumption.
Is this really what we are building our offshore wind for?
Recently I was struck, when I was looking at hyperscale datacentre proposals and developments in the pipeline, by the way many are sited next to substations linked to offshore wind developments.
For instance, it happens that Berwick Bank, set to be one of the biggest offshore wind farms in the world, connects to the grid via subsea cables at two points either side of the border between England and Scotland. One is at the Cambois substation, which also happens to be the site of a planned hyperscale centre, the other at Oxwellmains, also site of a data centre proposal.
Cambois looks set to use 720 MW, which is around half of Berwick Bank’s 1.4GW first phase and a fifth of the final 4.1GW potential of Berwick Bank. Add to that the possibility of Oxwellmains, and the Berwick Bank fraction used by AI only rises.
We may argue over the extent of its ecological and other impacts of Berwick Bank - which has been described by RSPB as the ‘deadliest’ windfarm for birds - but there is no doubt it is not nothing. It therefore seems all the more vital that power is used well.
Of course, Cambois may very well have no direct connection to Berwick Bank - and developers SSE Renewables said they could give me no information on this due to commercial sensitivity. SSE Renewables also seem to have made objections to the data centre in the early days of its application.
But, even if these two developments, a wind farm and a data centre, are just on the one hand producing electricity and feeding it into the grid, and, on the other taking it from the grid, their juxtaposition says something about a relationship between clean energy infrastructure and AI.
Seemingly unstoppable AI
In its manifesto the SNP state that its “ambition is to harness AI responsibly, for the benefit of everyone, whilst ensuring that Scotland remains competitive in an ever evolving global landscape”.
This sounds positive. But it feels as if there is insufficient debate happening around the rapid expansion for this highly energy-consumptive technology, its environmental impact, its relationship to power production, and the way it may further accelerate energy use.
Earlier this year, Mike Berners-Lee, author of There is No Planet B, did a talk for the UK Government on digital sustainability. He argued that we need to be “much more selective about which technologies we deploy and how”.
Berners-Lee had done an analysis of the sustainability of the world's ICT. What he observed is that its impacts accord with Jevons paradox: “ICT brings about efficiency in the world. But as a result, humans just do more and more of everything you can think of, and our impacts go up. That's the current default trajectory.”
Sign up for the Winds of Change newsletter and get a weekly update on all things climate and energy.
I firmly believe we need to get off burning fossil fuels and onto technologies like offshore wind for the sake of limiting climate change.
But in a world in which no energy comes entirely environmental-cost free, what power is used for matters as much as how it is made - and we are are caught in an AI momentum and energy-use acceleration, in which insufficient answers are being asked.
Renewables, including offshore wind, are vital to help us shift off fossil fuels, and urgently tackle the emissions that are contributing to climate change. But do we want them to be sucked into the hungry new guzzler on the block, AI? And do we even want what that guzzler does?
