Google’s huge new datacentre to emit massive tonnes of CO2 a year. Google has applied for planning permission for yet another enormous data centre in Thurrock, Essex. It will emit 570,000 tonnes of carbon emissions every year equivalent to about 500 short-haul flights a week, planning documents show.
Spread across 52 hectares (128 acres), the Thurrock “hyperscale datacentre” will be part of a wave of mammoth computer and AI power houses, if it secures planning consent. According to the campaigning publication Foxglove, an independent non-profit organisation that fights to make tech fair for everyone, it would be built on an important local wildlife site – destroying an important habitat for bees, butterflies, rare plants and birds.
Foxglove believes that the first step in stopping the project is convincing the local council to refuse the planning application. Everyone can help, by sending in their own individual objection. The deadline is Saturday 8 November.
The developer’s own figures, included in the planning application, estimate that Google’s Thurrock data centre would emit over half a million tonnes of carbon emissions every year. That’s the emissions equivalent to 260,000 gas boilers, or three Birmingham Airports. Google’s planning application stresses this remains a “minor adverse and not significant impact when compared to the UK carbon budgets”, but campaigners disagree, saying the UK has finite clean power and water resources and they are being disproportionately gobbled up by AI data centres. And as if the climate impact wasn’t bad enough, this data centre would concrete over an important habitat for wildlife.
Foxglove is teaming up with Conservation charity Buglife UK, who oppose Google’s data centre because it would threaten a site which is “home to hundreds of species of invertebrates…as well as rare plants such as Endangered Broad-leaved Cudweed, and birds such as Red Listed Nightingale”.
Supporters of the scheme point to the economic benefits of the proposal to the area’s infrastructure, with more jobs both in the construction and operational phases of the centre. They also believe that benefits will certainly outweigh any perceived harm.There are less than three weeks to persuade Thurrock council to refuse the planning application. You can click here to tell Thurrock Council to say no to Google’s plans.