Britain’s net zero dream could be crushed by big tech

Britain’s net zero dream could be crushed by big tech

Looking out the window of Danny Leach’s five-bedroom Victorian farmhouse, just past the swimming pool and Range Rover on the drive, rolling green fields stretch into the horizon. “I bought it for the views and the peace and quiet,” the self-made businessman says of his family home, now worth £3.5 million.

However, both the views and the peace and quiet could soon be in jeopardy. Despite sitting on precious green belt land, the 56-year-old recently found out that his rural four-acre plot in North Ockendon, greater London, is likely to have a noisy new neighbor: Europe’s biggest data centre.

If approved by Havering Council, the £5.3 billion development will replace the sound of birds chirping and views of the countryside with an array of Tesco superstore-sized warehouses – each towering 65ft high and roaring loudly thanks to potentially hundreds of thousands of computer servers inside.

The gigantic facilities represent the very real physical cost of our unquenchable thirst for the internet and, increasingly, these facilities pose a threat not only to our landscape but our energy supply too.

This year, big tech has started to sound the alarm that the boom in artificial intelligence (AI) – which is even more power hungry than the normal web – is putting the world in danger of missing its ambitious net zero targets.

Mr Leach is aware of the dilemmas at play. “I don’t want to be a hypocrite – I use an iPhone, I’ve got iPads, I’ve got 100,000 photos saved on the iCloud. I’m for the future and I know we need to move forward. But I don’t see why this has to be 40ft from my door,” he says.

Others share his frustration. Nearly 750 people from the surrounding villages have signed a petition against the vast 3.5 million square foot development, which could eventually house big tech tenants, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Residents fear their views will be spoiled, that their local wildlife is at risk, and that the narrow country lanes will be constantly congested by thousands of lorries trundling through during the construction phase (which is projected to last up to 12 years). But, in particular, they ask: Why here?

It’s a question many Britons up and down the country might soon be asking.

Demand for data centers has exploded over recent years as we increasingly move our lives online. Nearly every time we tap away on the internet through our phones or laptops, a warehouse full of computer servers swing into action to fulfill the task. The more we do it, the more data centers we need, and the more likely they are to appear on our own doorsteps.

Eleanor Alexander, managing director at Digital Reef, the company behind the development next to Mr Leach’s house, admitted they “ideally” would not have built on a green belt site – but their hand was forced. The firm says that the Warley substation nearby is the only supply point within 40 miles of London that could withstand the data centre’s 600 megawatt energy demands – the equivalent output of a typical coal-fired power plant. The high-voltage cables needed could only stretch just over a mile.

And this goes to the very heart of the problem. Space is not so much the issue – energy is, or the lack of it.

Tech leaders from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and OpenAI boss Sam Altman, to the billionaire owner of X (formerly Twitter) Elon Musk, have warned this year about generative AI’s voracious use of power. Musk warned it could lead to a global electricity shortage as early as next year. Some studies suggest the AI ​​industry alone could consume as much energy as a country the size of the Netherlands by 2027.

Large language models – the technology behind chatbots – can take months to be trained on vast amounts of data, running 24/7. Research suggests that ChatGPT uses around the same amount of energy per day as 33,000 US households in one year. The complexity involved in such programs’ generation of human-like answers means addressing each query is estimated to require four to five times as much power as it does on a normal search engine.

AI’s thirst for power has led to fears that technology is compromising the ambitious climate targets set by both governments and tech giants. Renewable energy is not yet consistent nor plentiful enough to keep up with AI demand, meaning officials and companies will likely have to fall back on fossil fuels. This year, both Google and Microsoft admitted their ambitious goals of reaching net zero by 2030 were under threat; revealing their greenhouse emissions had risen by 48 per cent and a third, respectively, over the past few years, largely due to the explosive growth of AI.

While big tech has a decent track record in pushing for and investing in renewable energy, critics suggest there has been too much focus on building the biggest and best AI model, rather than designing the most sustainable and lightweight, in a bid to stay ahead in the AI ​​arms race. “Securing market advantage is more important right now to most big tech firms because it’s a matter of survival,” says leading technologist Adam Leon Smith.

Still, industry leaders say that in the long run, AI itself will be the answer to the energy issues it poses. “Let’s not go overboard,” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently told an energy summit, arguing that AI’s ability to find climate solutions would eventually offset its own consumption. The technology is already having a major impact in the wider world, with existing models helping heavy manufacturing companies to identify and cut their worst emissions. Some are also providing detailed maps of plastic pollution in the ocean to make cleanup operations more effective.

It is being used effectively in data centers too, such as software that adjusts cooling systems in real-time to help conserve water supply. But in the short term, it’s still a long way off squaring the circle of its own power demands.

So what does this mean for the UK? The National Grid has predicted that AI will drive a spike in energy use, with the amount of power demanded by data centers expected to increase six-fold over the next decade. Given Britain’s energy infrastructure is already struggling under the weight of existing demand, and is in dire need of an upgrade, Labour’s aims of decarbonising the power supply by 2030 will certainly be put under immense pressure.

Couple this with the fact that Sir Keir Starmer’s government is also relying on AI to provide the silver bullet for cutting NHS waiting times and improving public services more widely. “How are we meant to meet the government’s forecast for AI growth while also reducing our carbon footprint?” asks John Booth, data center expert and managing director of the IT consultancy firm Carbon3IT. “We just haven’t got the power. It’s as simple as that.”

Despite the rather stark outlook, Silicon Valley’s giants remain undeterred. In January, Google started building a new £790 million, 33-acre data center in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire. Meanwhile, Microsoft has put down £2.5 billion to double its number of data centers in the UK over the next three years. It’s the single biggest investment the firm has made here in its 40-year history, with sites set for Newport and North Yorkshire.

They may well have been buoyed by Labour’s reported plans to ease planning restrictions, which had previously been a source of widespread frustration in the industry. Technology Secretary Peter Kyle is understood to be considering classifying data centers as nationally significant infrastructure projects. By doing so, planning decisions will be made by ministers and not councils – helping to bypass significant opposition from NIMBYs (“not in my backyard”).

“This won’t mean a free-for-all to build data centers left, right and centre,” says Luisa Cardani, head of data centers at industry body TechUK, but it is likely to encourage developers already hungry to move further outside of London to do so. Data centers have traditionally orbited around the capital to stay as close as possible to the beating heart of the UK services sector. It saw huge clusters develop around Slough (now the biggest data hub in Europe), and in London Docklands near Canary Wharf.

One of the main reasons for staying close to the capital was to minimize latency – the response time between clicking the mouse on the office computer and connecting to a server in the data center warehouse. “But with AI it’s different,” says Ms Cardani. “Models that are being trained don’t need to be close by anymore; instead they have far more urgent requirements – like getting enough energy to power them. The market is changing rapidly. You’ll see them move further north, and nearer the best universities, like Oxford and Cambridge.”

With access to power around London becoming ever harder to secure, it seems inevitable that data centers could soon be coming to a town or village near you. Indeed, less than a fortnight after taking office, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner had already intervened to recover two appeals for vast data center sites on green belt land that were rejected by councils in Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. It certainly gives the impression that power is returning to the hands of big tech under Labour.

In Mr Leach’s case, developers Digital Reef say they are trying their utmost to win residents over. Mindful of green belt land, they are aiming to set the “gold standard” when it comes to sustainable data centers. This includes turning half the 215-hectare site – equivalent to 330 football pitches – into an ecology park, with natural habitats reinstated for wildlife, such as beavers, and planting 140,000 trees. Other initiatives involve reusing the waste heat and directing it to agricultural greenhouses on site and to thousands of local homes.

The council is fully behind the project, perhaps won over by claims it will create 2,800 jobs and £86 million in wages for the local economy every year. But Digital Reef is still facing widespread opposition from locals. “We never expected to get everybody 100 per cent on board,” concedes Ms Alexander, who has spent the past two months consulting with the community. “But hopefully they feel engaged and at least understand why this type of project is needed.”

It’s not enough though for Mr Leach, who has lived on the land with his wife and son for the past 20 years. “My house is nearly 200 years old. It’s stood and enjoyed these views through Queen Victoria, two world wars, and everything else in between. Now they’re just coming in and paving over the whole lot.”