Data centres: environmental impact, and is Hertfordshire the right place?

In our new report, we consider the environmental impact of data centres, and evaluate whether Hertfordshire is the optimal location for these large industrial facilities.

Data centres have existed in urban locations within Hertfordshire for some time. But in the past two years, planning permission has been granted, albeit controversially, for two new hyper-scale data centres in the open countryside within the designated protected Green Belt in our county.

Recent changes in national planning policy have influenced this. One change is the Government’s introduction of it’s ‘grey belt’ policy, making it easier to build in the Green Belt. The other change means that data centres are now classified as Critical National Infrastructure, making it easier to gain planning permission for data centres everywhere.

Besides the obvious damaging effect these data centres have on the landscape, there are other important environmental impacts including:

• their huge requirements for electricity to power their servers and cooling equipment;
• the need for reliable connections to the power grid;
• for those data centres that are water cooled, their requirement for vast quantities of fresh water; and
• when sited in the countryside, their land take, most commonly of productive agricultural land that can then no longer be used to produce food.

Further details of these and other impacts of data centres are contained in our new report, which can be downloaded here.

Download

We are very grateful to our CPRE Hertfordshire volunteer who has researched and written this report.

Do you care about the Hertfordshire countryside and share our concern for its future?

Please join us. CPRE Hertfordshire works to protect, promote and enhance the Hertfordshire countryside – for everyone. We are a membership charity and it’s easy and quick to join online. Members enjoy benefits including discounts on training workshops and priority access to our planning expertise.