Under consideration PE2233: Moratorium on planning applications for all hyperscale data centres until their environmental impacts have been fully assessed
Calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to introduce a moratorium to prohibit planning permission from being granted for any hyperscale data centres, until it has carried out a thorough assessment of their impacts on Scotland's communities, greenhouse gas emissions, land and water resources and electricity grid; until regulations are modified to require all hyperscale AI data centres to carry out an Environmental Impact Assessment; and until the Scottish Government puts in place guidance on hyperscale AI data centres and ‘green data centres’.
Background information
Hyperscale data centres in our planning system would more than double Scotland’s current peak energy demand. Since they use energy 24/7 this will badly impact our climate targets as they cannot be powered by renewables alone and it is likely that they will require onsite gas generation if the grid cannot support them. They also require diesel or gas back-up generators which produce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. These hyperscale data centres are for AI Large Language Model training and inference, and are orders of magnitude bigger than our existing data centres which provide the computing and data storage infrastructure of the modern economy. (Scotland had between 10MW-30MW of co-location data centres in 2024).
We are calling for a pause on hyperscale data centres until the government carries out a thorough assessment of their impacts and puts them on Schedule 1 of the EIA Regulations.
6 signatures
This petition is now under consideration
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