Microsoft’s plans to build a data centre at Stourton will no doubt be good for the local economy creating both construction and operating jobs.

We all use the internet everyday and we need to infrastructure that allows us to do that. But … I do have my reservations.

The massive increase in data centres is being driven by the rise in Artificial Intelligence (AI). You know, Chat GPT and the first item when you search on Google.

AI, or more properly Machine Learning – it isn’t intelligent, clearly has it’s uses. AI can scan medical tests results faster and more accurately than humans, but it’s far from infallible. A barrister was struck off recently for citing legal cases that didn’t exist when they used AI to write their client’s defence.

But it’s the new big thing and the IT giants – Google, Meta and of course Microsoft – are jumping over each other to expand their capacity by building data centres like the one at Stourton right across the world.

Another word of warning. Expert IT watchers like John Naughton (emeritus professor of the public understanding of technology at the British Open University no less) are clear that this a bubble and that it will burst, just as previous IT booms have come to a swift end. Remember all the start ups that attracted multi-million investment as Web 2.0 took off? Most of them never turned a profit and the investors were left to count the cost.

So what is a data centre? It very simply a building filled with servers – computers. The servers consume a lot of electricity and generate a lot of heat, so they need cooling, which usually means air conditioning which uses more electricity and water.

Data centres are not environmentally friendly. Even if all the electricity they use is coming from renewable sources, they contribute to global warming but putting heat into the atmosphere. They also need water which we have learned this year, is not an unlimited source, even in Yorkshire.

There is a way to mitigate some of this impact. Leeds operates a rather good scheme called PIPES. This takes heat from the Waste to Power plant (incinerator) in Cross Green, which deals with all our black bin waste, and takes it across the city to heat homes and public buildings.

By the way, district heating systems like PIPES are not new. I went to school in Pimlico in London. Next to the school was a council estate called Churchill Gardens, which was built after the second world war. The estate was heated by warm air pumped under the Thames from Battersea power station. Why the technology wasn’t more widely adopted until the climate crisis struck I don’t know.

Any way PIPES hasn’t crossed the river yet, so we are not benefitting directly yet, but there are plans to develop the network in South Leeds by taking heat from the Verallia Glass Works, Lax & Shaw as was, in Hunslet.

You are possibly ahead of me here, but why don’t we insist that the Microsoft data centre also provides heat for the PIPES network?

 

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