Eco Loons Object to AI Centres in Scotland

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Doug Brodie

Scottish greens getting apoplexy!

From The Herald:

Data centres planned for Scotland would require a “mindblowing” amount of energy that would be sufficient to power several trips in the famous time-travelling DeLorean from the Back To The Future films, campaigners have calculated.

In the hit movies, Doc Brown’s fictional time-travelling car required 1.21 gigawatts (GW) of energy to take Marty McFly, played by actor Michael J Fox, back to 1985 – with this more than the 1.19GW of power produced by the Torness nuclear power station in East Lothian.

Kat Jones, director of the countryside charity Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS), criticised the “ridiculous” amount energy needed by the “hyperscale” data centres.

APRS has calculated that data centres in the planning system and going though pre-application processes could require between 4.7 and 5.5 GW of power.

Full story here.

Below is the APRS Press Release:

Today APRS and ERCS wrote to the Planning Minister Ivan McKee to express concern about the energy demands of data centres coming through Scotland’s planning system. They called for a pause on all planning applications until a more strategic approach can be made and strict environmental standards are defined for data centres. The full press release is below.

For release 12:01am Thursday 18th December 2025

An environmental charity has revealed that the energy demand from data centres currently in the Scottish planning system is between 4450 MW and 4950 MW, which is larger than the winter peak electricity demand for the whole of Scotland [1]. Information collected by Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) from the planning portals of Scotland’s local authorities found 17 hyperscale data centers at various stages of the planning process [2] and many others at earlier stages. None have yet received a decision on whether or not they have planning permission.

This rush of applications is related to the exponential growth of AI and the processing power that it demands. UK Government and Scottish Government  estimates give a figure of 10-30 MW for 2024 data centre capacity in Scotland. [5] Three quarters of the data centre electricity demand comes from planning applications from just one company.

Today, in a letter to the Scottish Government environmental charities Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) and the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland (ERCS) call for an urgent response to the threat these data centres pose to Scotland’s energy security, energy prices and climate targets.

APRS and ERCS are calling on the Scottish Government to pause all applications to give time to examine the implications for Scotland’s energy grid, energy prices and net zero targets, as well as other impacts on the environment and on local communities.

APRS Director, Kat Jones, told the Herald:

“It’s hard to imagine another area of life where boasting about how much energy something uses would be a selling point.

“You don’t see washing machines, houses and TVs sold on the basis of how much energy they use – rather the reverse. Society has been trying to be as efficient on energy as possible to deal with the existential threat of climate breakdown, after all.”

I do find it extraordinary that an organisation set up to protect the Scottish countryside should prioritise Net Zero over the industrialisation  of the Highlands by wind farms and pylons!

Kat Jones, of course, is welcome to give up computers and all the other trappings of modern life. But I suspect that she won’t.

And if these data centres are not built in Scotland, they will simply be built somewhere else.

There is a simple solution to all this. Build two or three clean burning, environmentally friendly CCGT plants.

As with Ireland, this is all a reminder that wind and solar power cannot run a modern economy.