Google developers significantly misstate carbon emissions of proposed UK datacentres

"Developers working for Google have significantly misstated how much carbon two proposed AI datacentres will contribute to the UK's total emissions in planning documents reviewed by the Guardian. The tech company wants to build two huge datacentres one 52-hectare (130 acre) project in Thurrock and another at an airfield in North Weald, both in Essex. To do so, developers are required to submit planning documents calculating how much carbon these projects will emit as a proportion of the UK's total carbon footprint."

"In both cases, they appear to have compared one year of the proposed datacentre's emissions with the UK's entire five-year carbon budget, understating the significance of their emissions by a factor of five, according to experts at the tech justice nonprofit Foxglove. Greystoke, a company planning to build another datacentre in north Lincolnshire, one of the largest in the UK, also appears to have misstated the emissions of its project in the same way."

"Taken together, the three developments will account for more than 1% of the UK's carbon budget in 2033. This is the equivalent to the emissions of a mid-sized city such as Bristol. Google has serious questions to answer about its dubious datacentre pollution figures, said Tim Squirrell, the head of strategy for Foxglove, which discovered the errors."

"By comparing one year of datacentre emissions with five years of UK emissions, they're making the environmental impact look five times smaller than it really is. He added: Unless they can explain themselves, it looks like they are seriously misleading the council and the public over the climate pollution their facility will cause."

Two proposed Google AI datacentres in Essex require planning documents estimating their carbon emissions as a share of the UK’s total carbon footprint. The documents appear to compare one year of datacentre emissions with the UK’s entire five-year carbon budget, reducing the apparent impact by about a factor of five. A separate datacentre proposal by Greystoke in north Lincolnshire shows a similar pattern. Combined, the three developments are projected to account for more than 1% of the UK’s carbon budget in 2033, comparable to emissions from a mid-sized city such as Bristol. Experts say the figures raise concerns about misleading councils and the public and reflect broader calculation problems in UK AI environmental assessments.

Read at www.theguardian.com