Scotland's data centre boom needs a public voice, and the Greens are right to demand one

Scottish Green MSP Patrick Harvie has written to First Minister John Swinney calling for a public consultation on AI data centre guidance. It's a political move, but the underlying question is one every Scottish community, business owner, and local authority should be asking: who decides where these things go, and who benefits from the heat they produce?

The global AI infrastructure race is arriving in Scotland whether we planned for it or not. Data centres are land-hungry, energy-hungry, and water-hungry facilities, and they are being built at a pace that local planning frameworks were never designed to handle. Patrick Harvie's letter to John Swinney is the first formal political push for Scotland to get ahead of this, rather than react to it after the concrete is already poured.

The ask is straightforward: open a public consultation on how Scotland governs AI data centre development. That means guidance on siting, energy sourcing, community benefit agreements, and, critically, what happens to the waste heat these facilities produce at industrial scale. According to the International Energy Agency, data centres globally consumed around 460 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, a figure projected to double by 2026. Scotland, with its surplus renewable energy capacity and cold climate, is an obvious destination for that infrastructure. The question is whether communities get a say in how it lands.

This matters beyond politics. The Scottish Government's own National Planning Framework 4, published in 2023, identifies data centres as a nationally significant development type, but practical guidance on community benefit, heat recovery obligations, and local energy integration remains patchy. Zero Waste Scotland and the Heat Networks team within the Scottish Government have both flagged waste heat from commercial and industrial sources as an underused resource in Scotland's district heating ambitions. A public consultation would give those ambitions some teeth.

The waste heat angle is not a fringe concern. Stockholm's data centre district heating network already supplies around 10 percent of the city's residential heat demand, according to the Stockholm Exergi utility. Helsinki, Dublin, and Amsterdam are pursuing similar schemes. Scotland has the renewable power, the cold climate, the land, and the political appetite. What it currently lacks is a coherent regulatory framework that requires, or even strongly incentivises, data centre operators to connect their surplus heat to local networks. A public consultation is how that framework gets built, with genuine input from the communities who would benefit.

For Scottish SMEs, this is not abstract policy. If your business is in a town where a large data centre is being planned or has recently opened, the decisions made in the next 12 months will determine whether your premises sit on a cheap district heating network in 2027 or whether that heat simply vents into the sky while your energy bills stay where they are. Business Gateway and Scottish Enterprise have both highlighted energy cost reduction as one of the top priorities for SME resilience. Waste heat from AI infrastructure is a direct answer to that problem, but only if the planning and policy infrastructure exists to capture it.

What this means for you: If there's a data centre in your area, or one planned nearby, this consultation process is worth watching closely. Community heat networks fed by AI server waste could meaningfully cut your energy bills within a few years, but that only happens if local businesses make their voices heard during the policy window. Check what your local council's position is on the National Planning Framework 4 data centre provisions, and consider engaging through your local Business Gateway or Chamber of Commerce when any consultation opens.