The great data centre controversy. What they don't tell you.
Award-winning engineer Corey Boyle puts the case for bringing data centres to Edinburgh and Scotland
“Data centres are environmental disasters,” they’re “not sustainable”, “consume excessive water.” “Data centres are responsible for local water shortages”
These are the accusations thrown at a new public enemy number one, data centres. Some of it is true. But a lot of it is misconception, and data centres have become the latest villain in the existential climate fight.
Either way, they are going to be built. Whether you like it or not. Economies, industries, services and day to day life are charging towards AI, which could make us more productive, more innovative, and richer. If the tech bubble bursts and this momentum stalls, the jolt to the world economy would be enormous, and in our already volatile 2026, it would be ugly.
If data centres are coming anyway, shouldn’t we build them where the negatives can be reduced, and the benefits maximised? They are resource-hungry, no question. Despite global internet traffic exploding 25-fold since 2010, efficiency gains mean data centres and networks only account for around 1-1.5% of global electricity and 1% of energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Our built-in advantages
Scotland has two built-in advantages when it comes to data centres: a cooler climate, which cuts cooling demand, and a grid that was 91.5% low-carbon in 2024 (renewables + nuclear + pumped storage), the highest in the UK.
And we are not short of power. Scotland generates around 40% more electricity than it consumes, yet some potential is still lost through curtailment when the system cannot absorb or move the surplus.
Curtailment is when wind farms are paid to turn down or switch off because the grid cannot move the power to where it is needed. In Scotland that is often driven by physical bottlenecks, especially at the boundary transmission areas, and across the Scotland to England interconnector.
The worst hit is northern Scotland. As more wind has come online, curtailment has reached almost 50% of available output in some months. In the first half of 2025 alone, more than 4 terrawatt-hours (TWh) - a terrawatt-hour is a unit of energy representing one trillion watt-hours - of wind power in northern Scotland was switched off at a cost of over £116m. That’s around 37% of the wind energy that could have been used over that period.
Zooming out, just over 10 TWh of clean power in the UK was curtailed in 2025, with 98% of it in Scotland. This would have powered every Scottish household during the same period.
