Foxglove and Global Action Plan put in submissions opposing second UK data centre – at Houghton Regis in Bedfordshire
Last week, Foxglove made submissions to a consultation on the decision of whether to allow a huge new data centre in central Bedfordshire. We think it will end up being operated by Amazon. This is why we’re getting involved:
Data centres require huge amounts of our drinking water and electrical power to run.
Recently, we have worked with the Guardian and Daily Telegraph to expose the huge levels of polluting emissions new hyperscale data centres will expel into our atmosphere.
Here’s the key point to remember from that investigation: new hyperscale data centres will pump carbon emissions comparable to major international airports into our air.
That leaves the government with two major questions to answer about allowing new gigantic data centres to be built:
- How it is going to come up with the drinking water and electrical power needed to run these monsters while keeping water in our taps?
- How will it meet its targets for cutting carbon emissions if a new international airport’s worth of emissions is spewed into our air when a new data centre is built?
Until these questions have been answered, both for the proposed Houghton Regis data centre in Bedfordshire and in general for all new projects across the country, planning permission should be refused.
Unfortunately, the direction of travel so far from government is the opposite. Last month, deputy prime minister Angela Rayner overruled the decision of a local council in Hertfordshire and gave the green light to a 96 megawatt (MW) data centre. She did the same thing in December last year in Buckinghamshire for a 140 MW site.
The rationale, as always, is a vague promise of “growth” – though it’s not spelled out exactly how building new server farms for Amazon, Google and Meta will magically transform into growth in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire – especially when the job promises of new data centres are routinely oversold.
Reasonable people may disagree about the potential of Generative AI, or LLMs, to deliver the transformative economic growth that its most enthusiastic cheerleaders say it will.
What is not up for debate is the tremendous resource cost, in drinking water, power and carbon emissions, of the hyperscale data centres proposed in the current UK building spree. That’s why we’re pushing back and asking government to show they have a plan for building new hyperscale data centres without trashing our critical supplies of drinking water, power or shredding our chances of cleaning up our air.
You can read our full submission here.
And to keep up to date with all our work holding the government to account on plans to build gigantic water guzzling data centres against the will of local councils – and with the North West already in drought this year – hit the button below: