Future Cities Forum report on data centres - strategy and sustainability
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Introduction
Future Cities Forum's recent discussion on 'Data Centres - strategy, district integration and sustainability' looked at the impact and opportunities of the growth of data centres in the UK, mainly located in the south of the country near London.
Contributors to the discussion were: Leader of Hertsmere Borough Council, Cllr Jeremy Newmark, former Head of Electrification & Energy at Places for London (TfL's property company) and Advisor and Developer of Clean Energy , Alex Gilbert, John Jeffery, Director, Mace Construct, Chris Patience, Principal, Grimshaw, and James Warne, Director, Buro Happold Engineering.
The UK is third behind the US and Germany in terms of the number of data centres that are being commissioned and built and the Government is keen that this growth boosts the UK economy. However, concerns remain from communities around the design quality of data centres near homes, pollution and energy costs, and on the impact on the landscape, if built further out.
Leader of Hertsmere Borough Council, Cllr Jeremy Newmark said during the debate:
'In many cases, data centres end up on private land that may be Green Belt, but it's currently closed and gated and not accessible to the public. But with the right sort of design, with the right sort of collaboration with developers, it's often possible to effectively ensure that some of that Green Belt land does become open and accessible to the public.'
Questions posed at the forum included:
How do we design our data centres to fit more into sensitively into the landscape and cityscape?
Should data centres be built closer to towns and cities?
What are the benefits for communities of data centres being built closer to businesses and housing?
Do net zero concerns remain around emissions from data centres and is it a myth that they require excessive amounts of water to run?
Is data centre building at the detriment of our much needed housing growth?
The largest super hub in Europe
The leader of Hertsmere Borough Council, Councillor Jeremy Newmark, began talking about the Council's recently granted permission for a new data centre, which is being built on Green Belt land and which is signposted to become the biggest media super hub in Europe, located near to Elstree Film Studios:
'I've positively encouraged not just this one particular DC01 data centre now called the Hertfordshire Campus, but actually a cluster of data centres to invest in our area because there is a natural affinity, if you like, between Cloud AI data centres and the film and TV media cluster that we have around here. And that's not the iconic Elstree Film Studios. It's also BBC Elstree Centre, Fairbank Studios, Sky Elstree, which is going through a massive expansion.
'The reason that I talk about a natural alliance and natural affinity is because modern film and TV studios are one of the few applications for Cloud AI based data where physical proximity matters. In most circumstances, the data centre can be anywhere, the clients can be anywhere and it just works. That's the beauty of the Cloud. But when it comes to filming major blockbuster movies on virtual screens as live, you have this thing, and I'm not a technical person, but lag and latency and all of that. And although the delays can be measured in microseconds and milliseconds, that absolutely matters when it comes to syncing everything together.
'So the film and TV studio cluster that we have is going to become increasingly reliant upon close physical proximity to data centres. In fact, in the States now, every time a new film or TV studio is built, it normally comes with either a small data centre baked in on site or a data centre in tandem next door. So here we are, a local economy that is absolutely predicated on the success of our creative industries and the future of our creative industries is going to be predicated on the success of easy and close proximity access to data.'
Cllr Newmark was asked about the long-term security that these data centres could bring. He commented:
'Well, look, clearly job levels will peak during the construction period. But when you're looking at data centres of the size of Equinix DC01, the number of permanent ongoing jobs is certainly not insignificant in the high hundreds. That matters. And I think that as we talk about short term jobs, again, something we're used to around here, most of the film and TV industry runs on the gig economy. Productions come, productions go, things move forward. It's something that we're used to dealing with. But I think having these economic powerhouses at the heart of our borough, and even if we don't necessarily know the direction that the technology will move in, the constant need for renewing and updating the tech and so on, we're fairly confident that the net impact on the jobs market will always be a positive one.'
Image: CGI from Equinix of part of the data centre campus in Hertfordshire, near Elstree Studios
Use of the Green Belt
Jeremy was then asked about how he could allay fears in his own borough about sacrificing the Green Belt for data centre construction?
Cllr Newmark responded:
'And once it's built on, you can never get it back. But I take a pragmatic approach to this. And I think most people do. You hear the campaign groups and they take, I would say, quite an apocalyptic view on this. My approach is that just as the debate around housing, where we say that there is a strong case for sacrificing a small percentage, you can argue over what that percentage is, maybe 3 percent, maybe 5 percent, maybe 8 or 9 percent. I suspect probably under 10 percent of our greenbelt for the greater good. Be that solving the housing crisis or protecting and galvanizing our local economy.
'For me, we have to bite the bullet and accept that that is an acceptable sacrifice in an area like Hertsmere, where our borough is 80 percent Greenbelt. If we take the view that Greenbelt is (untouchable), then nothing will, nothing will ever move forward. And I think that the situation that we have here is one in which the sacrifice of a very small percentage of Greenbelt for the greater good is clearly the sensible, pragmatic way to ensure that we get the kind of growth the area needs.
'In many cases, data centres end up on private land that may be Greenbelt, but it's currently closed and gated and not accessible to the public. And with the right sort of design, with the right sort of collaboration with developers, it's often possible to effectively ensure that some of that Greenbelt land does become open and accessible to the public. You know, people talk about green energy parks and so on. Well, actually, we can have green corridors within appropriately designed data centre complexes or surrounding them, thereby perhaps reducing the overall amount of Greenbelt in the percentage tables, but increasing the amount of Greenbelt that's actually open and accessible to members of the public.'
The conversation then moved on to discuss design codes for data centres and whether they would snatch land away from areas that could be used to build much-needed housing. Cllr Newmark stated:
'On the design question, first of all, we've taken the view and we've worked through our planning team very closely with the developers to ensure that these things are not just going to look like huge sheds. You know, we're talking quality frontages, decent landscaping and actual real architecture. If something can't face the street or face the public domain in the way we would want it to, then in my view, it doesn't belong there. So, you know, the external design elements are critical. And then issues like pumping waste heat into the pool, studios, leisure centres, a data centre that warms a neighbourhood clearly earns its place in that neighbourhood.
'Ultimately, I believe local authorities need to all be updating their local plans to ensure that they incorporate specific design codes for data centres up front. And that makes quality a condition of entry rather than a negotiation every time. And then, look, I think the question on whether or not data centres squeeze out housing, it's a little bit of a red herring because the real competition isn't for land. It's actually competition for access to the energy grid because a data centre and a large housing complex queuing up for the same substation, that's the real squeeze that we're seeing right now. And I think that the way you address that is by sequencing them carefully together.
'So planning, growth and infrastructure as a single conversation. That's what we try to do here in Hertfordshire through our growth board on a county wide level and avoiding allocating homes and data centres to the same constrained capacity without ensuring we're getting funded. So, yes, I think that's the real point at which data centres and housing rub up against each other rather than the shortage of land.'
Image: Bunhill 2 Energy Centre in Islington, London - courtesy of TfL - which represented a world first in using waste heat from a transport network station to heat homes and a primary school. According to Ramboll 'The new energy centre uses state-of-the-art technology on the site of a disused Underground station that commuters have not seen for almost 100 years. The remains of the station have been transformed to house a huge underground fan which extracts warm air from the Northern line tunnels below. The warm air is used to heat water that is then pumped to buildings in the neighbourhood through a new 1.5km network of underground pipes.'
Planning and joined up infrastructure
Alex Gilbert was asked whether it was likely that joined up infrastructure for data and energy centres would be quickly planned and consented to allow for housing to benefit from such facilities. He responded:
'I think it absolutely can be the case that these two can work together. The key thing, as ever, is going to be the planning and the joined-up thinking, which is the first major cliche of the day there. But we know that's going to be the case. This is going to need some serious planning. And I'm not normally one to pile in with big top down thinking, but this needs to come in right from a national level all the way through because the Hertfordshire campus and the likes of those are so big.
'The impact they have, is not just on the local economy, but the national economy. When you scale these things up and you can see examples like in Ireland, that's the one that everyone's sort of now stepping back and looking out with a little bit of a bit of distance and seeing what they did, which was basically allow data centres just to run riot for a few years. And now they've suddenly realised, oh, OK, all of these costs have gone on to the actual people, the bill payers. There's no land. There's no power that anyone can access. So they can't build transport. They can't build housing. And the data centres are great. And they'll say we've pumped billions of euros into Ireland. But really, has that money actually gone to the people? It's very hard to trace.
'So, certainly what I did in my time at TfL was looking at it. I'll borrow Jeremy's pragmatic, which is to try and build businesses, build viable commercial propositions off the back of these energy users. So we did the same with EV charging. I've got the scarf behind me here. That's our joint venture. People obviously criticised EV charging. Do we need that? Why are we not just encouraging cars? You know, we went through all of this. But the point is, we built a joint venture. We built a business off the back of it, though you'll never keep everybody happy, but it's the best way we can do that. And I think we need a lot of partnerships and collaborations.
'One point perhaps where I disagree with Jeremy here is I'm very worried the data centres will say what they need to, to get their planning. And in reality, they won't work with the local communities because they're way too big and powerful for anyone to actually hold them to account. And of course, they'll say in the example of something like heat, Jeremy will say, yeah, we told them to make the heat available and they'll say, sure, we made it available. But someone else has got to come in and spend millions providing a heat network to local communities. Well, who's going to do that in local leisure centres and schools? That's not going to happen.'
Energy demands and sustainability
Alex was asked whether all energy demands were known at planning stage, so that energy networks are not overwhelmed. He said:
'They often simply don't know it at that stage anyway, because it depends what they're building and what they're planning on doing. There's enough heat. There's certainly enough. There's enough energy coming in. There's enough waste heat to do, frankly, anything they want. But it's only going to be with planning enforcement that they are going to support those local communities, whether it be housing, whether it be if there's a school nearby. But again, they'll turn around and say, well, the school needs to spend millions on making that heat network happen. And of course, they can't. It's a state school. I mean, they're struggling for £3.50 to get some new pens. It's never going to happen unless the data centre can actually go and support that. And again, that's only going to happen with a firm planning hand.'
Data centres and housing
The question of whether too many data centres were being planned and built in the south of the country and whether that would affect housing targets from lack of available land was tackled by Alex:
'This is a point that I'll be interested in others' views as well. It's something I've spent years trying to understand. I've been in this for 20 odd years or 25 years in the green tech space. And this sort of (growth) curve of data centres grew up in the 2000s. And by around sort of post crash, they they were all going abroad to these fantastic Bond villain homes. They were building in Norwegian fjords and sort of inside volcanoes. And there were all these amazing images of some data centre in a disused canyon somewhere in Norway. And wow, this is the future of data. And in the last 10 years, of course, they've ended up coming from a Norwegian, fjord south. And you kind of go, well, how in the world has that happened?
'Some of it is the latency, which was just noted. But it seems every industry is now demanding this latency for very high speed trading by the Bank of England. You can understand we've got to be within five miles of a bank. OK, we've heard that media needs to be there. But every sector is now saying, yes, we know all the energy and the land is in northern Scotland and we could do a renewable energy farm. And wouldn't that be great? But actually, we need to be in Slough. So everyone's ended up in Slough. We've seen what happens to Slough.
'So I'm waiting for the industry. And I keep being told lots of industries don't need that level of latency. The AI models that are just training models, right? They can be working away in the background. They could be up in Scotland on a nice offshore wind platform. But I'm not seeing evidence. All I'm seeing is everyone saying we've got to be in London. So that's causing the pressure, because funnily enough, people don't want housing in the very, very north of Scotland. They want it close to London.'
Concerns over water shortages and data centres
On the theme of environmental concerns, John Jeffrey, Mace Construct, dismissed the persistent claim of data centres needing lots of water to run:
'So I've designed and built data centres for nearly 50 years and seen, obviously, massive change in terms of the type of compute we have and an even bigger change happening now. And with the AI and cloud computing models that we have now, that that's forcing even more change. And for training AI, you'll see a lot of data centres moving to places where they have power that's a quarter of the price of the UK, i.e. Norway.
'It's in on hydroelectric dams, which are sources that never fail. So these don't need generators. And they're training their AI systems there. When you talk about inference AI, i.e. that what you and I are using every day, that needs to be nearer to the people who are actually going to be using it. Hence, you need them to be near populaces.
'Coming to your question on water, it is pretty much a total misnomer that data centres use water. Some do. And to be frank, many of our American big hyperscale companies. They have relied on water for cooling for some of their data centres and it has been their model. But they are generally all moving away from that. The next data centre that we were talking about earlier, I can guarantee that we'll be using water for its cooling, but it's not using water as an adaptive source. Therefore, it won't be using water, having high water consumption. You put water in it. It keeps circulating around. And that circulation between internal and external air combined with refrigeration systems is what provides the cooling.'
John was asked whether the standard of debate was high enough in the country to enable proper discussions and the planning of data centres, while enabling communities to be informed well. John commented:
'I think the data centre industry is a bit a bit guilty of not of not singing its own praises and and putting the right employed people to actually be those community liaisons. Empowerment is to actually make sure it's being represented well in the communities and in the councils and the planning.
'But I also want to elevate it to a higher level than that, as I've designed and built hundreds of data centres and in pretty much all of them, I've put in the ability to export heat. And in my whole career, I've only done it actually once. Why is that? That's because the UK doesn't have a joined up energy policy around data centres. So we at Mace have been heavily involved in the New Hospital programme. As an example, why hasn't central government mandated to locate data centres and hospitals, which are ideal bedfellows to have effectively free cooling and free heating for the life of hospital next to each other or within a reasonable distance from each other?
'So in the UK, there's very few heat networks compared to the Scandinavia areas. And say in Denmark, we export from our Facebook data centre. We built it there. We export over 50 megawatts of heat to that community. And it has a joined economic and energy plan for the development. My argument for the UK is that we talk about new new towns and big extensions of towns. We should be putting data centres in the heart of those communities to actually be joined up energy infrastructure for those communities. I think we just seem to miss that in UK policy.'
John continued:
'I've had various discussions with various government bodies about it and trying to raise the profile. And it's just personally I always put it on a mission of mine to actually try and change the thinking and and and try and get these things joined up.
'I am pleased to say that though I've only ever done that and built it once in Denmark, a couple of projects we are building at the moment are in an area of London that is going to be deploying a heat network. That particular local authority has put out a tender for that and awarded a company to build a heat network for the area.
'It will source its heating from about five or six big data centres, including two that we're currently building. It's just such a rare pocket. I think Milton Keynes is another area where there are some data centres that actually export to the Milton Keynes local energy grid.'
Image: 'Data Centres and the City: From Problem to Solution on the Path to Sustainable Urbanism' at Venice Biennale 2025 -The installation was designed and constructed by Grimshaw in collaboration with Goodman and Arup. Photography courtesy by Peter Bennetts
Data centres and urban design
Chris Patience, Grimshaw, was brought into the conversation to talk about the value of data centres being built on the edge or in the middle of cities:
'Certainly talking about the Venice Biennale exhibition, we actually developed that in collaboration with Goodman and Arup. It was very much about trying to promote the positive aspects of data centres rather than dealing with them as very much isolated, hidden objects in the landscape. It was very much about bringing them close to cities, to communities.
'That exhibition explored the huge amount of benefit that data centres could bring if you start to think about them as positive assets. We've touched upon a lot of those opportunities today, but obviously the heat element is a major benefit. If you can provide free heat to housing, to businesses, communities won't be resisting development. They'll be seeing that as a positive thing.
'In terms of the discussion around jobs, certainly in terms of Jeremy's reference, if you think about a data centre as part of a wider development, rather than just an isolated object, you can start to create economic benefits. You can start to introduce different uses, whether that be research opportunities, offices, light industrial. So in terms of jobs in particular, it's looking at the sort of secondary and tertiary opportunities that data centres provide as opposed to just that building.
Design codes for data centre building
Chris went on to say that data centres do not have to be designed poorly:
'Data centres historically haven't been designed well, Architecturally. I don't think there are many that people could cite that are of design excellence. I think that's changing massively in the last five years. Yes I think they take a long time to build. So, I think there will be sort of better examples coming on stream. They don't have to be big black blank boxes. There are lots of examples of infrastructure, whether that's bridges, whether that's energy centres, whether that's nuclear power stations that can be designed well - just because they don't have windows and they're big. They don't have to be ugly.
'Design requires deep thinking and exploring opportunity. For example, designing a facade well may involve a little bit of extra cost in quality materials, but most of that cost in the grand scheme of a data centre, it is literally peanuts to spend a little bit more money on a quality facade. But it also feeds back into this idea of integrated development. You could quite easily create active frontages by introducing different uses, different buildings on a campus to create activity and a sense of quality. It's just about thinking about things differently and thinking about things in a much more integrated way as opposed to just just defining these things as isolated boxes.'
The French perspective
The question of how data centres are designed in France came up in the discussion as Grimshaw has been involved in projects there through its Paris office. Chris said:
'I wouldn't say they are completely different, but I think certainly developers we're working with, have a very forward way of thinking in terms of integrated development. We're working on a couple of projects for CP Infrastructure who are very much about looking at the data centre as one component of the site. So a lot of their sites are enormous. I think one of them is 500 megawatts. The other one is going to be a gigawatt in total data centre capacity.
'But we're also looking at things like introducing urban farms to utilise the export heat, light industrial, really trying to push the edges of the site boundaries back to provide public space and community parks. All of those things that don't really cost money. And actually, some of those things I mentioned have economic value to developers.
'So certainly the developers we're working with are thinking in a much more of an integrated way. I think this is also supported by local government level initiatives. They have a requirement for any data centre above 500 kilowatts, which is basically every data centre you can imagine these days, to provide a certain amount of export heat. I think it's about 20 percent. They don't have to connect to the wider grid. So they have to make sure that you're providing access to that export heat to the site boundary. And then there's a wider conversation about how you connect into it. But at least that is starting to create a mandate for providing export heat. So that feels like such an easy win for the UK.'
The UK planning system and investment
To establish whether it has been true that some investors have been put off the UK because of the complicated planning system, James Warne, Director Buro Happold Engineering said:
'I think to address that question, there's a bigger picture about why people are wanting to develop data centres in the UK. So we've touched on that. John and Chris talked about some of the reasons why. And I think planning is a strength in this country. But with that strength is also a bit of intimidation. So if we're not careful, we can put off investment in data centres by creating an apparent set of rules that is adding cost. So if we start saying you've got to do this, you've got to do this, the free market will say, well, it's easier to go off to somewhere else where the planning restrictions aren't as strict and they're not as onerous.
'I'm supporting everything Chris just said, about where we're bringing value. And I don't believe it should be necessarily on the data centre provider to foot the bill for absolutely everything. It's about that economic advantage to everyone. And I think strategically, there should be a national vision for how we integrate data centres. And that comes back to, as Chris was saying, that French example about integrating with heat networks and addressing embodied carbon in data centres. It's looking at the electrical infrastructure. So quite often we're finding that connecting up data centres to power isn't a problem, but there is a huge shortage of power. And it's about that strategic definition of what's a private network, a private wire and what's national infrastructure.
'We've got to start thinking about data centres as part of an infrastructure network because they should be assets to the infrastructure. And I think that, going back to the planning question, the planners can draw from national guidance, but they can't draw, they're restricted from making their own localised guidance - going back to politics, with David Cameron coming in and cutting away all the red tape. So we need that national guidance to come along and address data centres and how they're integrated into cities. And it's only once we're integrating them into cities properly that I completely agree we need to get rid of beige boxes that sit on the outskirts. And no one quite knows what they are.
'A big issue when you look at a lot of the complaints about data centres, be it noise or the fact that they use lots of water or energy, it is mainly the MEP engineers that are, I won't say letting the side down because they're following a brief. And what we need to do is be smarter about setting that brief. What does good performance look like? How do we balance John's point about water? How do we balance the use of water and the use of energy to create the most efficient data centre? For a long time, it's been the case that we're just looking at power. It's about that balance of looking at multiple things.'
James was asked about the latest announcement from Ofgem that developers should potentially pay millions up front for connection to the grid?
'There's a lot of money being invested by not just data centres, but health care and everyone else who's connecting into the grid. A lot of money going into the grid. UK Power Networks being an example of how we're seeing more of a business case for developing private wire networks and bringing in renewable energy and dealing with the renewable energy, rather than having a reliance on national infrastructure and what was the National Grid.'
Powering data centres and renewable energy
A question was asked around whether renewable energy was reliable enough to power data centres. James said:
'No, it's not going to do it, but it is part of the solution. So the idea that there's one technology that's going to come along as a silver bullet, we've known for a long time that's not going to happen. What it is about, I'm going to go back to strategy. It's that strategic infrastructure planning, which is something we do a lot of. It's about looking at master plans and looking at the bigger picture and about the neighbourhoods and synergies between that community that you're building.
'Whether that's a science tech background or media or health care, it's about creating those neighbourhoods where you've got that infrastructure ready to go through and then integrating in a renewable strategy that suits that neighbourhood, not just the data centre. And you'll find that the data centre can help others in the same way that it can also afford to add in renewables when perhaps that local primary school can't add in.
''But if you start to penalise one part of that development, then you're going to make it unattractive for that developer to come in. And I think that's coming back to John's point. That's what's put people off in the past about connecting to district heating is the idea of spending five, ten million pounds on heat pump technology to create community heating when they haven't actually got any obligation and there is no strategic business case for it. Within London, the heat networks we work with, we've successfully managed to make the data centre benefit from being able to give away low grade heat and the community getting cheap, energy efficient, low carbon heat. And economically, everyone's better off. It just requires the right capital investment and the right mechanism to extract money.'
Data centre regulation
Alex brought up the topic of regulation in the field of data centres. He questioned:
'What we think the impact of regulation, that heat zoning will do, because that's been talked about for years. And it's certainly something that's been on my mind. Many of you will be aware that we've had waste heat networks from the London Underground for quite a while now, at Bunhill in Islington. The whole world came and saw that. And it was a fantastic, innovative angle. And I've stopped talking about it just because, frankly, it's now boring and we haven't managed to replicate it because there's none of the enforcement that we've all talked about. So I wanted to get a view on zoning.
John commented:
'Well, one thing I did want to say, Heather, was in relation to planning, actually, compared to our continental neighbours. Actually, I don't think I don't think planning is is a big off-putter to data centre developers. There's a great thing in our planning system called outline planning applications. And when you start to conceive, to do data centre development, you really have not probably not got a clue what actually the computing end user case is going to be at the point when you're going to buy it and when you're actually going to build it and get it running. Is it going to be a cloud computing data centre? Is it going to be enterprise? Is it going to be AI training or AI inference? And the specifications for all those things are totally different to each other. So outline planning gives us the ability to put in an application and get an outline permission. A lot of continental Europe does not have a similar system and you have to go in with effectively a RIBA stage 3 - ready design to be able to go in for any type of planning application.'
Jeremy added:
'I wouldn't over-egg the extent to which planning reforms are going to impact on this. I think in most cases and because of the size of the enterprises involved, data centres are still going to go through the sort of old school planning committee model rather than be designated down to offices, as some things will in the latest set of reforms. I think the move towards regional and sub-regional spatial development plans will help.
'But the missing element of that is any sense of pairing those up with strategic regional or sub-regional spatial energy plans, which is perhaps a missed opportunity. But perhaps that will come with the increased focus on devolution and the expansion of the unitary council models based on the local government reorganisation process that many areas are currently going through. I think on balance, the housing reforms probably favour doing data centres more easily, but also doing them better.
'I will just say sort of a word on the point that was raised earlier that sort of Alex came back on, because I think it's related on this, about how you reassure communities through the planning system. I do think that actually many of the big data centre operators and constructors are now learning that within the planning system, but also in terms of broader community relations, you develop that trust and you earn it through accepting that at the end of the day, it's a function of planning enforcement and not sort of pretty glossy brochures.
'So I think that within existing planning rules, pre-reform, things like binding noise limits, dark sky, lighting, construction management plans can all be adequately conditioned and policed. I think one thing that we've done here is create requirements, again, within existing planning law, requiring data centres to publish live ongoing monitoring data. The operators all exude confidence on this. So it's absolutely incumbent, I believe, on local authorities to use their powers to say to them what will show us those numbers.
'Then, of course, something that we've not really touched upon, but it is open to local authorities, particularly through a previous set of planning reforms, to be really innovative and creative to wiring community benefits, both through section 106 and seal contributions to ensure we talked a lot about the waste heat and connections to the grid and so on. But I think that's just the tip of the iceberg because our current planning rules enable local authorities to ensure that residents see the upside of data centre presence in their area directly by investment in their own high streets and their own neighbourhoods.
'Those are provisions that already exist that we need to do better on. I said to colleagues in local authorities who are asking us, you know, what have we learned from the Equinix experience and so on? And we've still got the reserve matter application to come through. But my top line is that our sort of planning cabinet members need to have ready and waiting that section 106 shopping list and to be really robust in taking that out to the constructors and developers and operators.'
Chris commented:
'It just goes back to what we've all been saying today is that it is about integrated development and thinking about things as a wider system. I think also the point about logistics developers - we're working with Goodman across about eight different sites. And what we've established with Goodman, who are a very large logistics developer initially, is that because they've had that experience of not just working in data centres, they are actually much more open to looking at different uses and promoting that integrated approach.
'So I think we probably suffered a little bit from data centre operators just being solely focused on their one offer of the data centre. And I think actually starting to break that mould is going to help us create much more integrated, sustainable development.
'I was also just going to raise one point, I think, just in terms of the planning discussion and I think linking into what John was saying about outline planning. We're seeing a huge trend across multiple sites at the moment where projects are starting to move into DCO, development control orders. January saw obviously data centres becoming NSIPs and the Section 35 allowing developers to opt into the DCO process. And what that does is it really starts to secure good design as a fundamental requirement.
'As part of the DCO process, you need to really demonstrate that. But also in terms of DCO, you build in flexibility. So you have a series of parameter plans, design principles, but it establishes a level of flexibility for your design to adapt, which we know in the data centre world changes on a monthly basis. So I think in the next couple of years, I think we'll see a huge amount more data centre projects moving through DCO. And I think that will already improve the level of quality.'
A skilled workforce for data centres
Jeremy discussed the important point of making sure that the training is in place for talent coming through the data industry:
'I think that's something that the areas in which data centres are located, it's incumbent upon local authorities to ensure that that training and skills agenda is pursued locally. One of the really exciting projects, actually, that we're working on with Equinix as a benefit of DCO1, and it's not a planning condition per se, it's more of a partnership that we've built up, is the conversion of a former pub site into a community AI, tech and robotics skills centre open at our local schools, colleges and communities.
'That's something that we've been able to curate and shape on a local level. So we're certainly not waiting for government to jump in on that. And obviously, any kind of central incentives on skills and training are great. But I think that as local authorities, we can work and are arguably best place to work with the providers to ensure that when they come to town, there is a sort of skills and training package that comes with it. We're a few years out from this sense of being operational, but we have ensured that Equinix are already present inside our local schools, colleges, at careers fairs, advising young people what it is they need to be accessing and helping them access it to leverage their ability to benefit from the jobs that will be created.
Alex added:
'I use the TfL one, the skills and training that was set up. We had I think 12,000 people that passed through these construction academies. Again. If you can link these things up, our skills and training has been unbelievably successful and has proven these models can work. And you get the construction sector and others on board. Tunnelling academies, all sorts of academies have been set up that perhaps 10 years ago, people would have turned their noses up, frankly, at things like tunnelling. We still need tunnellers in this country. We can be all proud and high and mighty, but without tunnellers, you don't build the Elizabeth line.
'The last thing is we know how difficult it's been to build green energy. Data centres are coming in with these huge promises. In reality, we know what's happened in the US. They've all promised but they can't do it. They're just building fossil fuels. That's what's happening in a nutshell. I'm very, very worried about that here. Everyone will go, oh, there's no planning to allow for wind or solar or whatever. And it looks like they're going to have to build a massive gas turbine. Or we're going to talk about small modular reactors or something else that will take five years. That's a big concern.
'If these guys are going to come in, they need to come in with their own green energy. And that means you need national and local planning to allow that to happen. And then we can look at developing this and having local community energy benefits. In the example of an Equinix, that local energy could go out and serve the local community and you can have local development off the back of it. But you need to get that green energy again, right up front from the beginning.'
Future Cities Forum would like to thank all its contributors to this important discussion.
Image below: CGI from APT of Cyrus One's consented hyper scale data centre project in Ealing, West London
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