Press release: English council approves data centre with one million tonnes annual climate pollution
A council in the East of England today approved outline planning permission for a large-scale data centre which will cause annual climate pollution equivalent to every domestic flight in the UK.
Councillors on North Lincolnshire planning committee unanimously voted to approve the proposed Elsham data centre – despite concerns raised over its environmental impact, and misleading figures in the planning documents.
The council’s own documents stated that “peak annual Scope 2 emissions” caused by the data centre will reach 1,004,478 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) in the year 2033-34. Scope 2 emissions in this case are the climate pollution that will be caused generating the electricity which will power the data centre.
The figure, which is almost equivalent to the total climate pollution caused by all of the UK’s domestic flights (1.2m tCO2e), had been described in a council report as “not significant”.
The council appears to have arrived at this conclusion by comparing one year of the emissions from the data centre with five years’ worth of emissions for the entirety of the UK – a comparison which tech justice non-profit Foxglove had described as “both mistaken and deeply misleading.”
Foxglove warned the planning committee about these discrepancies, but it still voted in favour of the development.
Tim Squirrell, head of strategy at Foxglove, said: “In approving this monstrous data centre, the council failed to properly weigh the enormous harms to the environment of the sheer quantities of electricity this development will use. They ignored their own policy which states 20% of energy must be generated through on site renewables, and they credulously accepted the developer’s incorrect figures which underestimated the impact of this data centre on the UK’s carbon budget by a factor of five. It is incredibly disappointing to see Big Tech’s dubious claims of economic growth spurred by AI data centres be put ahead of the ongoing climate crisis.”
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For further information, please email press [AT] foxglove.org.uk