Green Party wants to slam the brakes on UK datacenter construction until water and energy use are sorted

The Green Party of England and Wales wants the government to end the blanket designation of new bit barns as “critical infrastructure” and change planning rules to stop such facilities taking precedence over households for water and energy. The current UK government designated datacenters as critical national infrastructure ( …

[David M]

Disingenuous

> A government spokesperson told us: “A pause on building new datacenters would simply send investment and good jobs abroad, while leaving Britain dependent on overseas computing for the processing of sensitive health and defense data. Put simply, it would be a disaster for jobs and national security.”

Well that's nonsense, for a start. Once a datacentre [sic] is built, it needs very few people to run it, so long-term it will have minimal effect on jobs. And if most of the new datacentres are run by US mega-corps, then they'll be subject to the US CLOUD act, meaning that the the data is no more secure than if it was held overseas.

[JC_]

Re: Disingenuous

The datacentre has to be constructed (jobs), maintained (jobs), and upgraded over time (more jobs). None of those jobs are available if it's never built, and deciding not to build it will lose more jobs because local businesses can't get the benefits of having the datacentre here. Plenty of infrastructure is essential to the wider economy even if it doesn't require many people after construction.

The Green Party is full of degrowth NIMBYs. They oppose zero-carbon power generation because they oppose building anything, anywhere.

Complaining about data not being secure and also refusing to allow datacentres to be constructed in the UK, where local laws apply and people observe them or go to prison, seems awfully defeatist.

[abend0c4]

Re: Disingenuous

the UK, where local laws apply

If they belong to, or are leased to, or managed by foreign entities, then UK laws are not the only ones that apply.

I find it ironic that at the point we're finding that we're overly dependent on critical infrastructure operated by foreign interests that we're apparently determined to put more of our eggs in the same basket. Particularly when the supposed benefits are largely illusory.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Disingenuous

In fact, many datacentres are being constructed on inland freeports in which local laws do not necessarily apply! Especially the ones about taxes and business rates. So how much of that "Billions of pounds of investment" actually lands in UK pockets/coffers?

[Richard 12]

Re: Disingenuous

Construction is short-term. Once it's built, that's it. The builders move on somewhere else.

Running and maintenance is roughly 5-10 FTE jobs at most.

A single Tesco Express creates more jobs than a datacentre complex, and also serves the local community.

[John Robson]

Re: Disingenuous

What utter twaddle.

I assume you think that a £5m bung doesn’t need to be declared because it was a bribe…

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Disingenuous

Also, why can't the data centres be built in the parts of the UK where there is plenty of water and renewable power?

[JC_]

Re: Disingenuous

Water is a non-issue, the UK isn't Arizona, but incentivising construction in places with plentiful renewable power that can't always be transmitted would be very good. Sadly, regional/zonal electricity pricing wasn't taken up in the latest reforms so that natural incentive to build them in Scotland isn't there.

[Like a badger]

Re: Disingenuous

@ JC_ You make some solid points, but jobs isn't one of them. It is well established that there's a brief splurge of construction jobs for the bit barn, after that it's crickets and and the security guard's dog.

But 100% with you that the Green Party* are de-growth NIMBYs.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Disingenuous

> de-growth NIMBYs.

I like "CAVEMEN" = Citizens Against Virtually Everything

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Disingenuous

Not an anti-green. It was in an Irish newspaper about people in Dublin who complain about homelessness and lack of transit and infrastructure while being against anything being built anywhere

[Paul Herber]

Re: Disingenuous

Down with that sort of thing!

[Roj Blake]

Re: Disingenuous

Careful now.

[andy gibson]

Re: Disingenuous

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/22/proud-nimby-environment-developers-no-nature

[andy gibson]

Re: Disingenuous

"water is a non issue"

It really isn't.

My village suffers significant loss of water pressure when the fields are being watered.

I've no gripes with this, as I feel the cropfields were there before I moved here.

On the other hand, we're hardly in the sticks as we're only ten miles or so from Liverpool.

But I do have a gripe with United Utilities failing to invest in infrastructure to make this an issue.

[Someone Else]

Re: Disingenuous

You could put one in Scotland next to tRump's golf course there. I understand that there is a wind farm just offshore....

[elsergiovolador]

Funny

Imagine how deep the corrupt rabbit hole government is if Russia aligned parties want to do the right thing as a method of subversion.

[DS999]

Re: Funny

Imagine how deep in the nutjob conspiracy rabbit hole you have to be to believe the Green Party is "Russia aligned".

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Funny

>Green Party is "Russia aligned".

Well obviously the Green party is anti building anything with capital so is anti-capitalist and so must be communist and so must be Russian

Splutter .... What, Russia isn't communist? The USSR collapsed ? Why didn't I read that in the Telegraph ?

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Funny

Their rhetoric and political goals align with Russian interests - disrupt social cohesion, economy, energy security, weaken the military standing. Ticks all the boxes.

[ravenviz]

Water is a non issue, “Infrastructure Leaks: Around 2.95 billion litres of water are lost to leaks from water pipes across England and Wales every single day (about 20% of the entire public supply network).

Data Centre Consumption: Current data centres in England use about 6.6 million litres of drinking water per day. Even if capacity triples by 2030 as planned, consumption is projected to reach roughly 19.8 million litres per day.”

Source: Google AI using the prompt: “How much water will proposed data centres use compared to infrastructure leakage”

For context, animal agriculture “on-farm usage totals roughly 157 billion to 365 billion litres” annually: 0.4 billion to 1 billion litres/day.

Source: dalevince.com

[cyberdemon]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/07/could-uk-ever-run-out-of-water

> "Analysis by the Ends Report revealed 47bn kilolitres (kl) of water was extracted from the environment in England in 2023. Electricity generation took 26bn kl, public water supply took 9.2bn kl and agriculture took 2bn kl."

i.e. over half of our water goes on electricity generation (CCGT, Biomass and Nuclear - which provide 60% of our electricity - obviously Wind and Solar don't use any, but you can't run a datacentre on purely Wind and Solar).

Even if you build a datacentre with a closed-loop cooling system that "uses no water", it still uses water by virtue of guzzling fucktonnes of power. By "use water" I mean that fresh water drawn from rivers and boreholes is evaporated in the cooling towers of power stations, 90% of which subsequently falls into the sea.

[BartyFartsLast]

Ah, non issue then, we can all eat crappy AI videos instead

[Dan 55]

Source: Google AI

An authoritative source if ever there was one.

[ravenviz]

Re: authoritative source

The key here is transparency, lazy retorts are not helpful.

[Dan 55]

My reply is lazy because your method is equally lazy.

You prompted one question and got one answer, and decided from that that "water is a non-issue", yet any credible in-depth report into the such as that cited by the other poster in their reply shows that it is not a non-issue.

England is in a drought, yet apparently we must pretend resources aren't a problem and build more data centres so that we can ask grok if it's true.

[ravenviz]

The response was one of context. Water supply is of course an issue, but data centres do not and will not serve as a death knell to supply. There are far more pressing water provision matters to address before AI becomes more thirsty than our population.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, building datacentres will automatically fix all the leaks, is that what you're saying?

The reasons leaks exist is because it's hard and expensive to fix them. Do you think the water companies enjoy leaking water? No, they allow it because the cost to fix is so high. Maybe they need legislation to give them the kick they need, but datacentres has nothing to do with that.

[Spazturtle]

The water companies 'allow' leaks because Ofwat puts caps on how many leaks can be fixed per year.

[Tron]

What goes around, comes around.

UK governments spent decades avoiding the need for a national water grid and many more reservoirs, small one and big ones.They have nobody to blame but themselves in that dept.

As I mentioned in others posts, the UK doesn't have local tech capacity much beyond the Pi. We used to have ARM, but flogged them off. There is no appetite/investment for building a UK version of GAFA. Linux/LibreOffice/on-prem is all available, but gets snubbed for the cloud/SaaS/Windows/GAFA by government and industry. AI is inessential but they are falling over themselves to pay GAFA for it. Idiots.

The Greens are doing what all political parties do here and exploiting whatever they can for votes and coverage. Even with the infrastructure designation, nothing gets built here particularly quickly. Unfortunately that includes reservoirs, which (unlike AI) we really need.

The UK doesn't have much spare capacity - not energy, water, food, labour, money etc. Decades of short-termism, incompetence, cronyism, corruption, fakenomics and pandering to prejudices pushed the UK to the edge of the abyss and then Brexit came along and nudged us over it.

The data centres probably won't happen. Energy here is insanely expensive, the AI bubble will burst/deflate, and most UK politics is now just theatre for votes, with everyone running scared - annoy anyone over anything and Reform's vote count goes up.

Still, Andy v Zack is popcorn worthy.

[Anonymous Coward]

An environment

Who needs one?

Once we’re all assimilated into the AI core, we won’t need much of an environment.

Think ahead citizens, think ahead.

[cyberdemon]

Re: An environment

Maybe we should put the datacentres outside the environment

[Will Godfrey]

Doh!

With the UK's record of planning and construction, we'll probably finally bring vast power and water hungry data centres on-line just after the AI bubble pops.

[Snowy]

Water usage

There should be a better way to cool computers than using lot and lots of water!!!!

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Water usage

Use ice ?

[AndrueC]

Re: Water usage

Employ people to blow on the chips and/or wave a fan. That'll be good for employment.

[Paul Herber]

Re: Water usage

"Employ people to blow on the chips"

Exactly how would you write this job spec ?

[IGotOut]

Re: Water usage

Using ChatGPT of course. Duurrr

[teebie]

Re: Water usage

Wanted: people who can eat a fish super straight away without hurting their tongue.

[retiredFool]

Re: Water usage

Water is great stuff for cooling. Environmentally nontoxic to evaporate, energy transfer is very large (>500cal/g evap vs 1cal/g to raise it 1 degree C). And at one time, we'd thought it was limitless. And unfortunately the tech bro's still think it is.

[John Robson]

Re: Water usage

Water is infinitely recyclable... the problem is the desire to use highly treated water....

[retiredFool]

Re: Water usage

I've said this before, and I think worth repeating. Water evaporates and comes back as rain, agreed. The problem is it may not come back as rain where it evaporated, or where/when you want. As evidence of just how badly that can get, Lake Meade, hoover dam is getting close to deadpool because of overuse. And so the literally millions of people, businesses and agriculture that rely on that water source may find the taps are dry all of a sudden.

Another visible example is California's central valley. They have pumped well water massively over the past few decades. If it was all "recycled" as rain, why has the land fallen over 28'?

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Re: Water usage

Ugh, I’ve had to make this point as well to someone who failed to understand the physics. Yes, it’s a closed system, but it’s also a very big one.

[Mye]

Changed tariffs to include externalities

Data centers should have their own water and power tariffs. These tariffs should cover the cost for correcting all the externalities Data centers impose on the local community.

[Roland6]

Green party right on the money...

The Green party are absolutely correct to demand a stay on projects that require yet more energy and water where these are in short supply and any action to rectify the problem is going to take decades to build out.

If datacentres are going to be so so profitable then the investors will stump up the 10's of billions needed to create the supporting infrastructure, its what the Victorian's did...

[retiredFool]

You don't want to be backward and poor

At least according to the great clown oracle, donnie says objecting to DC's will make a community backward and poor. If ever there was an argument for opposing DC's, donnie for them is the bestest.