News

Global Action Plan and our partners Foxglove have issued a legal challenge to the Government’s decision to green-light an AI data centre on the outskirts of London.

The proposed data centre at Woodlands Park, near Iver in Buckinghamshire, was rejected twice by the local council. But in July the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government overturned that decision.

In addition to a worrying disregard of local democracy, the decision is all the more concerning because the data centre developers provided no assessment of the environmental impact this massive development would have. We believe the government acted unlawfully in giving the proposal the go-ahead given this glaring omission. 

Data centres have a big environmental impact. Giant warehouses of powerful computing equipment running 24/7 have – unsurprisingly – enormous electricity requirements. Our calculations show the energy demand of just this one data centre will be equivalent to that of a medium sized UK town. 

50+ new data centres are currently planned in the UK, most of which will be far bigger than this one. 

Electricity is only as green as the UK’s electricity grid, and despite good progress in renewables deployment, fossil fuels still provide a significant percentage of UK power – last year a third of UK electricity was generated by burning gas. 

So, despite many data centre developers’ claims of using “100% renewable energy”, by default a massive additional demand for electricity like this will result in additional carbon emissions. Failing to account for that – let alone mitigate it – is unacceptable. 

The cooling needs of 90MW of IT equipment are just as significant, but again there is no assessment of the impact of necessarily using massive quantities of drinking water to run the cooling system. 

Ours is the first legal challenge of this kind in the UK, but we think the arguments made in Woodlands Park will apply far wider than Buckinghamshire. We urgently need Government to compel data centre developers to not only disclose their full environmental impact, but to put in place robust plans to mitigate that. 

Without that transparency, and without meaningful environmental parameters for this booming industry – whose benefits to society are nothing like as clear as their cheerleaders make out – developments like this cannot be supported. 

Support our Crowdfunder

We need to raise money to cover the essential costs of taking the government to court, and we need your help.

Your support will make sure we can see this challenge through — and stand up for our environment, our resources, and our communities.  Please donate here.

Donate here