Questions to ask
Ask: the Welsh Government and the UK Government
“Where a data centre's demand on water, sewerage or grid infrastructure is regional rather than local, who should be treated as an affected party for consultation, and what mandatory reporting would be needed to identify them?”
Follow-up: Not yet asked, so far as we know.
What a responsible developer should commit to, before design is fixed
- Fund an independent regional assessment of effects on shared water, sewerage and grid infrastructure.
- Consult across the whole catchment and grid area affected, not only immediate neighbours.
- Publish annual water, power and wastewater figures.
From the paper “Beyond Planning Permission”
The full text of the relevant sections of the paper, with its own numbered notes. Note numbers match the paper.
18. Whose problem is this?
Concerns about water resources are connected to concerns about sewage and wastewater treatment capacity, and both are connected to the strain data centres can place on the electricity grid, discussed in Sections 4 and 15 above; it is already publicly acknowledged that some data centres are being built, or are seeking connection, in areas where grid capacity is not yet sufficient to serve them without reinforcement.
These effects are not necessarily confined to a development's immediate boundary.
People and businesses close to a proposed site are the most obviously affected, but a data centre's practical demand on shared water, sewerage and grid infrastructure can extend to anyone drawing on the same catchment, treatment works or grid connection, whether or not they live near the site itself.
That makes the ordinary planning concept of an 'affected neighbour' harder to apply than it might first appear: a household or business many miles from a proposed data centre may in practice be more exposed to its cumulative effect on a shared resource than an immediate neighbour would be, without necessarily being aware of the connection, still less being consulted about it.
This appraisal does not conclude that data centres are, on balance, harmful to the wider communities and infrastructure users connected to them; nor does it accept, on the evidence identified, the proposition sometimes advanced that there is no downside to data-centre development at all.
The honest position, consistent with the rest of this appraisal, is that the evidence needed to reach a considered view on cumulative and regional effects - including who should properly be treated as an affected party - is not yet routinely collected, connected or published. Addressing that evidence gap, rather than resolving the underlying dispute about costs and benefits, is the more immediate task this appraisal identifies for government and regulators.