British government caves on datacenter approval after legal challenge

The British government has conceded it should not have approved a campus near London's M25 orbital motorway and that the decision should be quashed, following a legal challenge by campaign group Foxglove. The non-profit filed its challenge last year after the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government overturned …

[Like a badger]

So, government...

..how's that red tape cutting going?

[Goodwin Sands]

Re: So, government...

Indeed. But they do have only themselves to blame. Their campaigning slogan should have been "cut UNNECESSARY red tape".

In this overcrowded modern Britain rules and regs protecting what little native wildlife we have left are definitely not UNNECESSARY.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So, government...

In this overcrowded modern Britain rules and regs protecting what little native wildlife we have left are definitely not UNNECESSARY.

Knowing the area fairly well, it's soggy fields relayed over a landfill site, squashed between the M25, the London-Bristol railway, adjacent to Iver sewage works, and West London Industrial Park. If government can't even grant planning permission for a major investment there, then we are truly screwed as a nation. It's the faux "environment" and "history" arguments that are major contributors to the delay and cost of every major project - the 350,000 pages of planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing being another example.

[Goodwin Sands]

Re: So, government...

Soggy fields over a landfill site to you maybe (and Angela Rayner too presumably) but not necessary to others with the eyes to see. But important thing is unless an EIA is done then we (ie society) do not have the facts to make an informed planning decision.

And with spring coming up an EIA for the site could (if the developers got their finger out and got cracking) be done and written up by end of summer which for a project the developers have been talking about since at least 2023 and should have done an EIA for, years ago, it is not a great deal of extra time. And my guess is the EIA hasn't been done because the developers know what it'll turn up.

Lower Thames Crossing btw is a completely diff story. Bonkers what has gone on there. Environmental rules, along with every other kind of rule and law, have been used and abused to try and block that project. What as a society we mustn't do is swing from one extreme (ie the absurdity of abuse and overkill of the Thames Crossing) to the other extreme of not even doing a simple EIA for other developments like this datacentre.

[Goodwin Sands]

Re: So, government...

For anyone wondering. An EIA is an Environmental Impact Assessment. It's a survey of the wildlife of a site and an assessment of what impact a proposed development would have on that wildlife.

[Woodnag]

Re: So, government...

Just because the location is fine doesn't mean that the 100MW+ of continuous power draw is available.

[BebopWeBop]

Re: So, government...

Or the water - SE Egland is already short due to 25 years of serial government incompetence.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So, government...

I live near to the site which is on the boundary of London. It's a protected piece of greenbelt that is stopping London expanding outwards into Buckinghamshire.

Without that greenbelt, towns and villages on the outskirts of London will eventually be swallowed up by the metropolis.

If you look at aerial photos from 50 years ago, Ealing was the edge of London with green farmland around it. That is all gone now. The area is fully developed and Ealing is deeply embedded in London. The same thing will happen to all the other towns and villages around London unless the green belt is protected.

The owner of the site is Altrad, a French company. A subsidiary of which, Cape Boards, was an asbestos company adjacent to the site. They knowingly suppressed the evidence of the harmful nature of asbestos, even employing a company doctor to tell the workers that it wasn't the asbestos making them sick. For years, they dumped huge amounts of asbestos waste into the Woodlands site, and after the factory closed, it was covered over and returned to farmland and designated as greenbelt belt, supposedly never to be disturbed again. So Altrad ended up with a large piece of land on the border of London that wasn't worth very much because it couldn't be built upon. Greystoke land is a law firm that specialises in perverting the law to force through planning permission on Greenbelt land. Once planning permission has been given, the land is removed from the greenbelt and becomes building land and it's value skyrockets. They don't even have to build the thing they proposed. Altrad stands to gain billions if this goes though.

Our current government pledged to "rip up the greenbelt" to build "affordable housing". Yet in their first week in office, they reversed two already decided planning decisions for Greystoke Land to build datacentres on greenbelt land. It's almost as if they owed something, or had made some promises to Greystoke. One could be forgiven for thinking that some kind of secretive deal had been done.

[Paul Hovnanian]

Re: So, government...

"how's that red tape cutting going?"

Lengthwise.

[Woodnag]

"Foxglove says the government now accepts the decision must be quashed, claiming officials concede there were insufficient measures to hold the developer and any future site occupier of the site to environmental impact commitments."

The end result will be that the planning consent will be retained, with extra safeguards for environmental impact mitigation mutually agreed between gov and developer. The mitigation will turn out to be non-binding of course.

[Goodwin Sands]

@Woodnag

Why do you think mitigation will turn out to be non-binding?

Any approval to build on that site is surely only going to happen dependent on creation of suitable compensatory habitat.

[Eecahmap]

Would that the Vogons had been held to such standards. . . .

[BebopWeBop]

I don't think you have been paying attention to government attempts to 'mitigate' against the financial impact on companies forced to mitigate against their consequences.

[Like a badger]

Even if this goes ahead, it shows that the UK planning system remains painfully slow, unpredictable and costly for anyone trying to build anything. Few will weep if the planned DC gets delayed or cancelled, but it's a symptom of the problems that have bedevilled anybody trying to build in the UK for decades. There's plenty of studies, they all show that the UK is paying far more pro rata even than comparable European countries for infrastructure, and of course it's ultimately you and I who pay the costs, either through taxation, or higher prices.

[elsergiovolador]

When things are artificially difficult and depend on decisions of individuals (or committees), this is an environment built for bribery and corruption.

[Dan 55]

depend on decisions of individuals (or committees)

Ah, so you're in favour of depending on an AI.

[elsergiovolador]

I’m in favour of clear, objective rules that are applied consistently, not discretionary systems where outcomes depend on who you get, how busy they are, or what mood they’re in. The more subjective and opaque the process, the more space you create for delay, rent-seeking, and yes, corruption. That’s not an argument for AI. It’s an argument for boring, predictable governance. Unfortunately the UK has none of that at the moment.

[Dan 55]

Every individual or committee interprets the situation according to the laws and the information they have available. In the NGO's opinion the planning minister did not correctly take into account the balance between differing laws and they took the case to court where the court ruling supported their view and development was stopped. The system worked. This isn't the US yet where you haven't got a hope in hell of stopping them.

You seem very keen to accuse politicians in the UK of bribery and corruption with little evidence for it. By all means call it out when there is evidence of it, but without evidence you all you do is cheapen the definition of corruption to some kind of catch-all insult used when something happens that you don't like.

[elsergiovolador]

Pointing to judicial review as proof the system works misses the point entirely. A decision that has to be overturned in court months or years later, at enormous cost, is evidence that the front end is broken. Legality is effectively enforced only for actors with money, time, and lawyers. Everyone else, small developers, local residents, ordinary businesses, lives with the initial decision, however arbitrary, inconsistent, or poorly reasoned it was.

The demand for “evidence of corruption” is bad faith because it assumes corruption only exists when someone is caught taking cash. Modern governance failures rarely work like that. They operate through discretion, opacity, selective urgency, and asymmetry of resources. Discretion itself creates value for the person exercising it. The benefit almost never appears as a neat transaction. It appears later and indirectly: influence accumulated, favours normalised, access eased, careers smoothed. The system is structured so any benefits of discretionary power are indirect, delayed, and deliberately deniable.

Courts as a theoretical backstop do not fix this. If the only check on discretionary power is litigation, then the real “system” for most people is whoever happens to be holding the pen. Calling that out is not cheapening the idea of corruption. It’s refusing to pretend that a slow, discretionary, litigation-dependent process is neutral or fair just because it occasionally corrects itself when someone rich or determined enough forces it to.

[Goodwin Sands]

Point Dan 55 makes about your keenness to cry bribery and corruption without offering up evidence I've thought myself many times when reading one of your comments. His "without evidence all you do is cheapen the definition" is I think exactly right. But having then read your rebuttal I now understand (and agree) with where you're coming from.

Suggestion, next time spell out what is you mean by corruption because I cannot believe Dan 55 and myself are the only ones who have been thinking this.

[BebopWeBop]

I think you only need to look at the behaviour of politicians, such as Jenrick and Desmond over permissions to realises there is eveidence form some corruption - provided you look hard enough. Jenrick just did not hide it properly.

[elsergiovolador]

Power

Was that the power of wine and steak?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Power

And prostitutes carring duffel bags of currency.

[andy gibson]

Rayner the hypocrite.

Remember when she said "Prioritise people’s needs ‘over newts’ in housing policy"

Funny how it didn't apply to her own consituency - there she is, front centre.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/local-news/campaigners-stage-human-chain-protest-16688239

“It can seem like a daunting task when you have to fight bureaucracy to protect the things you care about but you can win."

Hope the irony isn't lost on them!

[Doctor Syntax]

Ah, but that was entirely different. Her party wasn't in government then. And in was in one of her backyards.

[McBread]

Given the issues with our power grid and curtailment, perhaps we should be discouraging all new data centres in the south East?

[John Robson]

This - and the easiest way to do this is to use regional pricing for that power. Encourage these users to set up where there is power available, not where it's already constrained.

And no - the few ms of latency doesn't matter to basically any real workload - because those workloads are inevitably run within a DC, not between that DC and a user.

[Goodwin Sands]

A DC needs juice 24/365 so where in the UK do you have in mind?

Electricity generation & distribution is now such an unholy mess in this country I can't think of anywhere that fits the bill.

Agree about latency.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a hydroelectric dam in Wales.

[Anonymous Coward]

Has the hydroelectric dam in Wales got sufficient and spare capacity to supply a DC, and to do it 24/365?

[Richard 12]

Scotland

Scotland has a surfeit of wind power because there isn't enough load nearby and the interconnects were never designed for it.

It's so unbalanced that generating plant is regularly turned off - and the operators compensated for not being permitted to supply.

If the load were up there, this wouldn't happen.

Putting the datacentres within the M25 instead of roughly 2ms further away from London (and actually slightly closer to most of the population), means spending about a hundred billion on additional interconnects from Scotland.

Fibre optic would be millions, a saving of a several orders of magnitude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Scotland

Thing is the surfeit of wind power in Scotland isn't reliable 24/365. That's the catch. It can stop generating for anything from a few minutes to many days.

[John Robson]

Re: Scotland

And if you have cheap power for 340 days a year, you accept the very limited, and entirely predictable, downtime.

The power is reliable, it's just also variable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Scotland

No datacentre would accept that!!! Capital investment inside a DC requires it working 24/365.

And wind (ie loss of wind) is definitely not "entirely predictable".

[John Robson]

Re: Scotland

It really doesn't - particularly not if you significantly reduce the opex of running the stuff. Power and cooling aren't free.

And the wind is very predictable - we're very good at weather forecasts now. It's not like any of the recent storms have been a surprise. Can we predict the precise generation that we're going to get in September next year? No. Can we predict what it will be tomorrow... yes, with remarkable accuracy.

Heck, I can predict tomorrow's PV production on my tiny roof with pretty good accuracy - and that's small enough that the exact positioning of clouds matters, as potentially does really random things like leaves blown in the wind. If you're looking the production over a few hundred square kilometres then the accuracy goes way up.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Scotland

"It's so unbalanced that generating plant is regularly turned off - and the operators compensated for not being permitted to supply."

It really needs to be paired with things that don't have an issue with an intermittent power supply. Ammonia production is my favorite with some battery backup so the systems can start and stop gracefully. I expect there are plenty more depending on how variable the power is.

[John Robson]

Re: Scotland

There are plenty of things which are suitable for variable supply.

Even simple things like water heaters, which make up a significant fraction of domestic usage, can be switched. It doesn't really matter *when* they run, so long as they run for at least a few hours each day. Same applies to storage heaters, EVs, and others.

With a little bit more planning you can add things like washing machines, dishwashers and driers to that list - they have a defined profile which can't be easily interrupted, but the high usage section is generally pretty short. Occasionally, for instance after a holiday, there will be times when you want/need to run multiple loads back to back - but that's fine, you just tell it to run "now" rather than "before I get home tomorrow".

But ammonia supply - or other chemical energy storage with an RTE of anything... would be a good thing to have. The RTE isn't as important as it would be in most situations because you're using energy that would otherwise be wasted.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Scotland

But ammonia supply - or other chemical energy storage with an RTE of anything... would be a good thing to have. The RTE isn't as important as it would be in most situations because you're using energy that would otherwise be wasted.

Sure, but who pays? A lot of processes don't really like stop/start operations and there are joined-up-thinking challenges to things like ammonia. So Haber process uses water, methane and nitrogen. Methane is, of course evil, so our 'leaders' are making that ever more expensive. That could be replaced by syngas to make hydrogen, but that's also an energy intensive (ie expensive) process, and there's shipping and handling to consider. And then our 'leaders' have decided that ammonia-based fertilsers are also evil, despite improvements in crop yield. Or just also needing ammonia to make explosives to kill Russians, because Russia is also evil... And used to be a major ammonia supplier, until we sanction ourselves.

And then there might need to be political changes-

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/01/22/constraint-payments-soar-to-new-record/#more-90446

If we cannot export any surplus, the cost of annual curtailment would be £6.6 billion, based on the average wind/solar price of £79/MWh. That is now an understatement, given the latest CfD auctions.

In normal economics, ie not Millibrain-land, energy produced when there's no demand would be worth, and cost nothing. But this isn't the world we live in,, and constraint payments mean that subsidy farmers get paid regardless. So then a Catch-22 situation where if the 'surplus' energy is used rather than wasted, it would probably need to cost around the same as curtailment revenues or the subsidy farmers might go bust. Or if the energy costs double that of gas, the ammonia would be very expensive & uneconomic, or also push up the price of food even more. And then-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp372d37gxgo

The UK is set to back a vast new fleet of offshore wind projects in the North Sea alongside nine other European countries including Norway, Germany and the Netherlands.

The government says the deal will strengthen energy security by offering an escape from what it calls the "fossil fuel rollercoaster".

Which is yet more fantasy economics from Millibrain. All this will do is add billions to our energy costs, and allow subsidy farmers to sell to the higest bidder in 9 countries when demand exceeds supply in those 9 markets.. And demand increases are inevitable due to the insane 'Net Zero' policies, plus speculative demand for 'AI' bit-barns. Alternatively, if we just built more nuclear, we'd have more firm/reliable capacity, and the ability to export if (when) supply exceeds demand.. Which with some sane regulation, could also mean exports subsidise UK production, the UK gets cheaper energy and we become more competitive.

Also latest inflation figures for UK are also amusing-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnvg251g25yo

Higher tobacco prices and airfares pushed the UK rate of inflation higher for the first time in five months, official figures show.

The rise to 3.4% in the year to December was higher than expected with most economists predicting only a slight uptick.

However, analysts do not think it marks the start of a longer, upward trend because December's data includes one-off factors such as flight costs over Christmas and an increase in tobacco tax announced in the Budget.

Fagflation strikes again. But energy costs are also a big factor in inflation, and the increase in tobacco duty is not a 'one off'. That happens in every budget and with predictable consequences. Which is also good news for 'renewables' and their subsidy farms because their CfDs are self-inflating and increase based on inflation rate. Tobacco duty increases, so does our energy cost, even though the two are totally unrelated. I'm suprised our 'leaders' haven't grasped this yet, and how they could make significant reductions in inflation just by cutting tobacco duty. But their 'solution' will probably be to just exclude tobacco from rate calculations.

[John Robson]

Re: Scotland

So to summarise:

Yes, we should go to regional pricing, so that there is an incentive to colocate high power usage with high power production.

Of course you can't possibly acknowledge that whilst maintaining the rate of personal insults you throw out.

Net zero doesn't increase demand, it reduces it - I'm with you on the ridiculous power requirements of bit barns though.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Scotland

Yes, we should go to regional pricing, so that there is an incentive to colocate high power usage with high power production.

Sure, but this is a policy problem. Currently thanks to 'renewables', that's mostly Scotland. Latency-wise, it makes virtually no difference to 'AI' applications because the delay vs M25 is a couple of millseconds at worst. Running fibre up to Scotland is also a lot cheaper than trying to run power back down to where the demand is, which is again why UK electricity is the most expensive in the world, which then increases the cost of pretty much everything, driving inflation and making energy ever more expensive.

And then there's still the issue of what happens when the wind doesn't blow, so SNP crows about exporting energy, but in dunkelflaute conditions, it's very much dependent on Scotland importing electricity to keep the lights on, any industry powered and keeping people warm.

Of course you can't possibly acknowledge that whilst maintaining the rate of personal insults you throw out.

Millibrain is a moron and his actions confirm this. Or he's just plain evil and wants to crash the economy. He doesn't have to pay for his electricity, so doesn't have to care about the consquences of his sponsored policies. But Millibrain isn't unique in this respect because inflation also artificially inflates GDP and provides the illusion of economic growth, but it isn't real growth and it isn't sustainable.

Net zero doesn't increase demand, it reduces it - I'm with you on the ridiculous power requirements of bit barns though.

Net Zero very much increases electricity demand, especially as it revolves around carbon rather than the supposed problem of CO2 and the Global Warming a large part of the US is currently experiencing. Or Europe, eg Kiev's having a bit of a problem because no energy and a severe Winter. According to climate 'scientists', this shouldn't be happening because CO2, yet it is.. And one possible explanation is we had a few years of warming due to the Hunga Tonga eruption, the water vapor from that has precipitated and it's back to business for weather/climate, which means no strong correlation with CO2.

And Net Zero makes energy policy worse because we're 'decarbonising' our economy and penalising productive parts of it by increasing both energy costs and demands. So decarbonising transport, heating and even cooking. We don't have the electricity generating capacity to provide affordable, reliable energy with 'renewables', and achieving 'Net Zero' will make zero measurable difference to UK or global temperatures. So it's an utterly destructive and pointless paper pushing exercise that only exists because of 'legally binding' targets that were artificially imposed and governments could tear up at any time. Then the fixation with 'AI' just makes matters worse by adding demand that pushes up energy costs even further. But current policy socialises the costs instead of placing those on the demand generators.

[John Robson]

Re: Scotland

"Net Zero very much increases electricity demand"

It significantly reduces energy demand.

"We don't have the electricity generating capacity "

Of course not - we don't have the uranium enrichment facilities to supply a 100% nuclear power grid either - because it would be fucking stupid to have that much capacity before it's needed.

We are building out our renewable capacity, and we should be doing that in as diverse a manner as possible. Wind and solar are going to form the backbone of that, but other renewable (or pseudo renewable) sources exist.

"So it's an utterly destructive"... NOT going net zero is an utterly destructive act.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Scotland

"So it's an utterly destructive"... NOT going net zero is an utterly destructive act.

Ok, so for the sake of an argument.. Why do you think this? Bear in mind UK CO2 emissions, and observed rate of temperature increases. Like last years 'record' was 0.02C warmer and neither the Met Office nor the Bbc bothered to mention the uncertainty/error margins, or that around 50% of the Met Office's weather stations are improperly located and maintained.

Then Net Zero means decarbonising all heating and transportation and replacing high energy density, easily stored and transported fossil fuels with ultra-low density wind to achieve an outcome that can't be observed.. Other than economically.

And obligatory xkcd-

https://xkcd.com/1162/

The beauty of uranium is you don't need much of it because the energy density & potential is so high.

[John Robson]

Re: Scotland

We've been over this - Your idiocy and refusal to follow science doesn't make the damage less true.

The benefits to going net zero are many and varied.

I see your uranium and raise you Hydrogen... 610-640 million <J/kg

That's an order of magnitude more energy density.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Scotland

"A lot of processes don't really like stop/start operations and there are joined-up-thinking challenges to things like ammonia."

It's not my original idea, but one I read a paper on. Ammonia production is a huge worldwide power user but it's not like it has to be made 9a-5p every day. The market needs a certain amount per time period that's much coarser such as weekly. If it's made at 2am, nobody cares if the shipment arrives on time. The idea in the paper was that it would lead to a better ROI on a turbine to plant it in a nice windy spot with access to water and near to an Ammonia pipeline (US). The production plant(s) would be factory built in cargo container sized modules that would be placed immediately adjacent to the turbine(s). The output would be metered into the nearby underground network. No transmission losses and every watt of power could be absorbed (with some on-site battery storage so the system can turn on an off gracefully depending on wind conditions). The paper showed a much better return on the turbine than using it to feed a power grid.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Scotland

"Even simple things like water heaters, which make up a significant fraction of domestic usage, can be switched."

I'd hate for my supply of hot water to be regulated by some third party. What would be handy is if prices were transmitted down the line in ~15min intervals and I could program my multi-zone water heater to heat further down when power is cheap. Right now, my old tank water heater will be getting binned and a tankless installed once I've sorted out that I have all of the fittings and bits. It's just me and the hot water is generated with propane. To upgrade my electrical so I could add an electric hot water heater would likely be far too much. I like the concept. I will be adding some battery backup so if power is super cheap, I could top them up. I could also install a HVAC control that could be set to different temps based on the price of power.

It's industrial applications that would be able to take a significant load to keep turbines on. While the weather guessers aren't always on point with whether it will be cloudy or not, they do seem to nail the winds where I am down to the 1/2 hour. If I were processing food crops during harvest time, I could adjust work schedules if there was a good chance of cheap power in the offing.

[MachDiamond]

"Encourage these users to set up where there is power available, not where it's already constrained."

With how high the power needs are for a large data center, it might be a good idea to require those developers to also build (or significantly contribute to) power stations.

The question of latency has to be discussed with the sort and use of the data being processed. If it's GIS data that will be sold to farmers to asses water/soil, a whole day spent processing satellite and field data is no big deal. The military might want a really tiny amount of latency when processing passive sonar monitoring to detect enemy submarines, although they do that sort of thing in-house. If jobs can be prioritized, some of the work can be done while the sun is shining and/or the wind is blowing. A DC with a roof covered in solar panels amongst a field of wind turbines can be anywhere that isn't all the useful for food production and with tiny amounts of staff, it doesn't need to be bang up against a large population center where it might rob power when supplies are tight.

[John Robson]

"it might be a good idea to require those developers to also build (or significantly contribute to) power stations."

Absolutely...

And there is some movement in that direction in terms of developing micro reactors...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, hands up those who are agin these new data centres ?

Now, keep you hand up if you have never complained about $[YourFavouriteOnlineService] being available to you ? The rest can put their hands down.

Now, those with their hands up ... you are happy to use "stuff on the internet", but against building the bit-barns that make it possible. Do I need to explain more ?

Same with lecky - we don't want pylons, bury the cables (10x the cost); but we do want cheaper lecky. Same with mobiles - we don't want masts; but we do want good coverage. Need I go on ?

[Woodnag]

These are AI processing centres, not ISPs. This is nothing to do with $[YourFavouriteOnlineService] being available.

[Dan 55]

Depends if people would miss the deepfake porn and CSAM generator on X. However YouGov says 99% of the UK would not miss this.

[cyberdemon]

Well I for one was very happy when a Cloudflare outage took down ChatGPT, and when an internal IT clusterfuck took down Facebork

I'd be even happier if AI summaries on search were to disappear, along with autogenerated disinformation, nonconsensual smut and general slop from @Grok

Oh, and Notepad would be Notepad again, for a while.

Bring it on. Ban the slop-generating resource bonfires

[Doctor Syntax]

$[YourFavouriteOnlineService] not being available is more likely to be due to the operators at the DC fixing what wasn't broken rather than there being no DC, especially as there was a DC there yeserday.

[Richard 12]

I'm fine with there being DCs

Just, don't put them in places where the local power and water infrastructure is already massively overloaded.

DCs can be damn near anywhere. The whole of the UK is about 2ms across, and thus totally irrelevant for 99.9999% of applications.

Parts of Scotland have to turn off windmills because there isn't grid capacity to export the power to England, Drax, Hinckley etc prefer to stay at a constant load, there's swimming pools that could use low-grade waste heat and the like.

A little actual planning goes a long way.

[TimMaher]

Jaywick

It’s the most deprived neighbourhood in the UK. Needs all the investment it can get.

And it’s just East of Clacton. See if Nigel complains.

[Korev]

Re: Jaywick

Nigel won't complain because he's never there...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Jaywick

And how often is any MP in their constituency?

[BebopWeBop]

Re: Jaywick

Ours, once a week. But then he (a Tory) is not off gallivanting overseas or earning large amounts of money moonlighting. It makes all the difference.

[Woodnag]

Re: Jaywick

Investment? AI data centres are leeches, taking power and cooling water, and investing in the resources for neither.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Jaywick

Why should the UK expect data centres to invest in the nation's power and water infrastructure? A DC should be able to buy power and water same as any other service that it needs. If the UK is going to be successful as a country again it has to be able to increase supply of such things to meet demand - whether it's electricity, water, roads, building materials or whatever.

[Dan 55]

Re: Jaywick

What you propose is simply socialising costs and privatising profits.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Jaywick

No it isn't. It's about the need for national infrastructure, electricity especially, to be run competently, supplying demand and at a low price.

A DC should be able to buy power as a customer, same as you and I, or indeed any other business, without having to fork out for the host country's infrastructure. It is the job of the electricity generators/distributors to build, maintain, and run their systems and bill to cover their costs. Problem in the UK is because of numerous bad political decisions over many decades our electricity supply is in a terrible state and why we fret now over what should be a relatively unremarkable thing like hooking up a 90MW DC. And it's going to continue to get worse unless very serious change happens.

[Richard 12]

Re: Jaywick

Who pays for that investment, then?

If it's not the biggest consumers, then who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Jaywick

No massive investment is needed. The serious change that is needed starts with binning net zero policies. With no net zero the massive cost of restructuring the distribution network to accommodate pv and wind is gone and the cost of subsidies paid to pv and wind generators stops increasing.

Sans increasing subsidies, sans grid restructuring costs, and sans carbon taxes and similar, cost of elec almost halves. Suppliers profit margins can then increase which stimulates new capacity being built, gas and coal short term and nuclear long term, to get us back the low cost reliable baseload we desperately need.

It'll have to happen. Question is when and will it be in time to save our collapsing industrial base. It might need a change of government.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Jaywick

No massive investment is needed. The serious change that is needed starts with binning net zero policies

Agree wrt Net Zero, but I think a bigger question is-

We also approached the developer of the site, Greystoke Land Ltd, for its reaction and if it intended to take any action over this decision, but the company declined to comment.

So

Greystoke Land

Oxford Law Holdings

Stancroft Trust

Glengarry Trust (Canda)

As a rough structure with the applicant for several $1bn+ bit-barns having very little money, staff and a single director. Stancroft has a bit more in the way of assets, and with a quick search, couldn't find anything about Glengarry Trust. But not exactly well-known names in the bit-barn construction or operation game. Which can be sadly normal, but isn't exactly transparent. So might be a speculative planning application so the SPV can be paper-flipped with approvals and make some money. Or they're working on behalf of a more plausible name that wishes to remain anonymous.. and probably shouldn't be allowed to.

Question is when and will it be in time to save our collapsing industrial base. It might need a change of government.

Or planning regulations to reveal who the beneficial owners actually are. As it stands, Greystoke can't afford to pay for any planning conditions or undertakings, so approvals shouldn't be granted until they can show some money. And bit-barns are helping collapse our industrial base thanks to driving up the cost of electricity. They won't be helping with our tax base either, because if the eventual owner is one of the usual suspects, the datacentre will just be a massive cost so no, or with subsidies, a negative tax return. And virtually no employment either because most of the smart stuff will probably be done offshore.

But such is politics. Want to build 1GW of datacentres? Fine, just show you'll be building the 1GW of electricity generation, water production and treatment, and here's your rubber stamp.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Jaywick

True. But tis only a village and it draws attention away from 1001 towns and cities up and down the land that have neighbourhoods (each bigger than Jaywick) that are far far worse than Jaywick.

[Anonymous Coward]

We need many many more massive data centres

Clear the land

Clear the trees

Clear the wetlands!

Once the data centres are built we can all wear our VR headsets and watch nature videos!

Win/Win!

/s

[Jellied Eel]

Re: We need many many more massive data centres

Once the data centres are built we can all wear our VR headsets and watch nature videos!

We're doomed, doomed I tell you!

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5704427-trump-greenland-deal-framework/

“Embrace the penguin,” the White House wrote on the social platform X, alongside a photo depicting a penguin holding an American flag next to Trump with Greenland’s flag planted in the background.

Hours later, the Department of Defense’s rapid response page joined in with its own version, captioning the image “Be a warrior, embrace the penguin.

Oh.. dear. Or be a real warrior! Embrace the polar bear.