Welcome to your Friday edition of the Best of Bylines newsletter, bringing you a standout article from one of our 10 UK national and regional publications.
This time, Pilar Girvan of Bylines Scotland reveals something quietly disorienting about the idea of Ravenscraig, in part, being reborn as a data centre. Where furnaces once burned and 10,000 workers shaped steel into substantive products, the proposed Ravenscraig AI Energy Campus will produce little that is visible.
No smoke. No flames. No tangible product. Just data moving invisibly through servers across 160 acres of remediated ground, consuming 550MW of electricity, the equivalent of half a million homes, in near-total silence. A power guzzler propelling data through an ephemeral global landscape.
Apatura Energy’s £3.9bn proposal, to be built upon one of Europe’s largest brownfield sites, will sit within the Ravenscraig Masterplan. It includes a 600MW battery storage facility, and is framed in the language of opportunity. Apatura claims it will contribute 0.4% of Scotland’s annual GDP once operational, and will support 2,399 jobs, 1,044 of them permanently located in North Lanarkshire. Local MP Pamela Nash has called it “the next chapter”, a romantic narrative of industrial heritage repurposed for the digital age. The language is seductive, but it is also worth interrogating.
Ravenscraig is one of 24 data centre proposals advancing through Scotland’s planning system, representing 4.45-4.95 GW of energy demand (according to a press release by Ravenscraig) – larger than Scotland’s entire winter peak electricity consumption. Under National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4), “green data centres” are designated national developments, granting them a privileged position within the planning system. This carries significant weight. It is therefore alarming to discover there is no consensus around the definition of a “green data centre”.
When Ariane Burgess MSP asked the Scottish Government to outline the criteria determining whether a data centre qualifies as “green” under NPF4, the response was equivocal: planning authorities should “interpret and apply NPF4 according to the circumstances of each individual case”. It is a concept without substance. There are no binding standards. In practice any data centre drawing from Scotland’s grid could designate itself as green. Furthermore, the analysis underpinning NPF4’s position on “green data centres” was published in 2022, predating the mass proliferation of Chat AI models which have entirely reshaped energy demands.
Apatura and other developers recently drafted their own charter, Delivering Green Data Centres in Scotland. However, writing your own standards, again vague on detail, is not the same as being held to account by external bodies. More substance is required to refute claims of greenwashing, with its concomitant illusory narratives.
One of the biggest environmental issues surrounding hyperscale data centres, in addition to their vast energy use, lies in their water consumption. A single Google search requires approximately half a millilitre of water. By comparison, ChatGPT consumes roughly 500ml, the equivalent of a bottle of Highland Spring, for every 10 to 50 responses. A medium-sized data centre uses the equivalent of 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling alone. Globally, AI infrastructure may soon consume around six times more water than Denmark. Scottish data centres have already been reported as using enough water annually to fill 27 million bottles. None of these data centres are required to disclose how much water they actually use.
Ravenscraig’s developers claim a closed-loop cooling system, but the publicly available detail is thin. Water uptake in the energy consumed off-site must also be counted. While Scotland faces less water stress than many regions, it is not a licence to proceed without scrutiny, disclosure or limits. It is a starting point for a candid conversation we need to have sooner rather than later.
On emissions, specific details are similarly lacking. The full speculative pipeline of hyperscale data centre proposals in Scotland could add up to 5.8 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Indeed, the rejected proposal at Edinburgh South Gyle was projected to produce emissions equivalent to 10% of Edinburgh’s annual total. Most recently, the data centre proposal at Larbert (another Apatura site) has attracted over 1,657 public objections, with serious concerns about its proposed diesel generators, placing it among Scotland’s top 10 sources of exhaust emissions. This does not include greenhouse gas impacts during both construction and operation. An EIA was however required and its scrutiny has therefore been visible and substantial. Most proposals, including Ravenscraig, do not face the same requirement.
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The topic of discussion is how Trumpism, populism, media capture, and democratic decay are shaping politics in America and the UK – and, crucially, what we can do to protect democracy on both sides of the Atlantic.
Taking place at Leicester Square Theatre on Thursday 30 July, 7 pm, the event is titled The authoritarian playbook: what Britain can learn from America. Tickets can be booked here: bit.ly/LPplaybook.
And now back to Pilar’s revealing article…
The job figures attached to Ravenscraig warrant attention. The proposed 1,044 permanent roles appear a lean return for a project of this scale and ambition. Data centres, once built, typically run on skeleton staff. The bulk of employment lies in construction, as well as indirect economic activity, which is often overstated in comparable UK announcements.
Local residents previously raised concerns about unfulfilled promises related to the Masterplan, and these concerns are being reinvigorated by the proposed data centre. One such concern relates to the potential repercussions of an AI bubble burst. If the market turns sour, large language models such as Chat GPT could be at risk of collapse, with a huge knock-on effect for data centres like Ravenscraig and their localities. Circumspection and opposition to Ravenscraig is therefore not irrational, and mirrors other proposed data centre sites, such as Larbert.
In addition to Ravenscraig and Larbert, Apatura proposes seven other data centres across Scotland’s central belt, with a combined 1.6GW of confirmed grid connections. And 4.4 miles north of Ravenscraig, DataVita’s Airdrie site was awarded AI Growth Zone status in January 2026, with a promised investment of £8.2bn. Between Ravenscraig and Airdrie alone, over 1,000MW of capacity is proposed in North Lanarkshire. The cumulative impact of this concentration has not been formally assessed.
Scotland’s planning system currently determines each application at local authority level. There is no mechanism for assessing the combined effect of 24 proposals on the national grid, on emissions targets, on water supply, or on communities. Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS) have created an interactive map detailing each proposal, bolstering their call for a moratorium on hyperscale development.
Additionally, First Minister John Swinney was recently challenged by Ross Greer MSP to pause hyperscale approvals above 50MW pending a coherent national strategy. He declined, noting existing planning policy was sufficient for councils to make their own decisions. The fact that if all 24 proposals proceed, they will consume more than Scotland’s current peak energy demand, has not been publicly addressed.
A moratorium on new hyperscale data centres is not without precedent elsewhere in the world. New York recently approved a one-year moratorium on permits, citing the need to study impacts on the energy grid, water supply and consumers – a pause for breath other US states are considering.
And it is not just environmental concerns we should focus on. AI generation as a result of data centre power is far from neutral. Training data carries the biases and inequalities of the world it draws from. Algorithmic systems shape decisions in healthcare, welfare, law and employment, embedding those biases at scale, with consequences felt most acutely by those least fairly equipped to challenge them. Those in creative industries whose work has been used to train these models also receive nothing in return, and are even now competing directly with the tools built on their labour. Even Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, has cautioned against the direction AI development is following, warning of a tendency towards concentrations of power, environmental degradation, and the erosion of human dignity. It is a powerful read regardless of faith.
A new UN report projects that by 2030 global data centres powering AI will consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity. This is nearly triple the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria. The associated water footprint will equal the basic domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa.
These are not abstract numbers. They are the context in which Ravenscraig and Scotland’s 23 other proposed data centres must be evaluated. The case for a pause is not a case against technology, nor against investment in North Lanarkshire per se. It is a case for carefully thought-out decisions, for ethics to be considered, for binding standards to be implemented, and to ensure the planning framework is appropriate for the scale of development. The near-silence emanating from Ravenscraig’s 160 acres should not be the loudest thing in the room.
N.B. The planning application is expected for submission later this summer. A Proposal of Application Notice was submitted in 2025, with the outcome indicating no major impediments had been identified.
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