The other day, in an article in The Scotsman, an industry insider was pushing the notion that data centres are a solution to Scotland’s problem of electricity surplus. This is not the first time I have come across this claim in recent days, and we will be hearing it made again and again, but at best this is a useless solution to a made up problem, or just a deliberate lie to prop up the data centre ‘business case’.

Firstly, data centres do not consume surplus, they just consume, 24/7, on a massive scale (the currently planned data centre capacity would about double our national demand for electricity). Neither data centres, nor their operators, care whether there is a surplus or a shortage in the grid, and the consequences of that are born by ordinary people, as folk in the US have repeatedly found out.

Secondly, Scotland doesn’t produce surplus of electricity as such. This is something that is not well understood, not least because far too many people do not understand the distinction between electrical power (measured in Watts) and electrical energy (measured in Watt-hours). Scotland’s renewables nowadays produces roughly enough electrical energy over the course of a year to cover our own consumption, but they do not produce enough electrical power on day-to-day basis to cover our own demand, never mind surplus.

To convert surplus power into future power requires energy storage, but the storage technologies are simply not there to provide country-scale energy reserves. This is one of the big reasons why decarbonisation of energy (as opposed to purely electricity, which only accounts for about 20% of our energy use) is not going to happen any time soon, for country-level strategic energy reserves need to be in the order of tens of days, whereas electricity storage can provide somewhere in the order of tens of hours.

This ties into the other big lie plaguing Scotland today, namely that renewable electricity has no environmental cost; this is not the case, not just on the superficially visible level, but as a matter of rudimentary principle, for environmental change is the inherent price of energy extraction in any form.

The unfolding environmental meta-crisis requires that Scotland today should not be looking at increasing our renewable capacity, but at reducing our energy consumption. As a general principle, energy should be generated near to where it is consumed, forcing communities to live within their means, for, like it or not, that’s the only sustainable paradigm.

But, yet again, our natural resources are being exploited for the benefit not of the people of Scotland but outsiders, England determined to preserve the ‘green and pleasant’, yet unwilling to change, and, so, again, looking to export its problems into the sticks that is Scotland. And, sadly, Scottish politicians seem totally oblivious to what is happening. But then mediocrity and incompetence are the hallmarks of contemporary Scottish politics of all colours.