Datacentre developers urged to reveal impact on UK’s net emissions.

Datacentre developers are under growing scrutiny to disclose whether their schemes will raise the United Kingdom’s net greenhouse‑gas output, as worries mount that the facilities could double the nation’s electricity consumption.

Advocacy groups have addressed a letter to the UK technology secretary, Liz Kendall, cautioning that the power needed for emerging AI infrastructure constitutes a “serious threat to efforts to decarbonise the electricity grid”.

The correspondence urges developers to prove that their plans will not add to the country’s total CO₂ emissions or aggravate local water shortages, as required by an upcoming national policy statement (NPS) on datacentres.

“Absent these guarantees, such massive electricity use will inevitably produce massive climate emissions,” the campaigners assert.

The missive bears the signatures of Foxglove – an organisation opposing the dominance of large tech firms – together with five additional NGOs, among them the environmental group Friends of the Earth.

Earlier this week, members of the parliamentary environmental audit committee announced a probe into the ecological sustainability of datacentres and released a letter from energy secretary Ed Miliband, in which he noted that future power demand from datacentres “remains inherently uncertain”. The United Kingdom has pledged to reach net‑zero emissions by 2050, meaning that total greenhouse‑gas releases must be balanced by the amount removed from the atmosphere.

Ofgem, Britain’s energy regulator, has recently issued a calculation showing that the electricity sought by new datacentre projects would surpass the present peak of national power use. In a consultation this month, Ofgem indicated that roughly 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by artificial‑intelligence workloads, could require 50 GW of electricity – about 5 GW more than Great Britain’s current peak demand.

Datacentres slated for Elsham in Lincolnshire and Cambois in Northumberland each anticipate a power requirement of 1 GW, comparable to the output of a nuclear power station, the letter notes, and will need to be matched by fresh renewable generation.

The United Kingdom is experiencing a datacentre surge alongside an AI‑focused investment wave. Datacentres form the backbone of AI applications such as chatbots and image‑generation tools, playing a crucial role in training and running services like ChatGPT and Gemini, yet they consume large quantities of electricity for their servers and need water for cooling.

The campaigners also point to a planned Google datacentre in Essex that is projected to emit more than half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, roughly equivalent to 500 short‑haul flights each week.

The letter states: “With an estimated 100‑200 new datacentre proposals already in the planning pipeline, it is essential that the NPS fully recognises and tackles these issues, so that the public and the climate are not left to foot the environmental bill for these installations.”