London City Hall is developing a policy around data centres to address concerns about carbon emissions and power and water use, Greater London Authority officials have said.
Megan Life, GLA’s assistant director for environment and energy, told the London Assembly Environment Committee that the policy would aim to balance the economic benefits of data centres with their environmental impact, the BBC reported.
‘Challenging’ issues
She said the policy was intended to “keep hold of the kind of economic growth benefits that data centres offer” while mitigating “quite challenging” issues around power use.
Deputy mayor for the Environment Mete Coban said data centres brought both “big benefits” and “massive challenges” for the capital on energy and water consumption.
He said it was important to protect the environment from “a few global corporations who will take and not give back”.
“It’s not just a London problem, it’s going to be a global problem,” he added.
Housing delays
In December the London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee demanded a specific data centre policy in the next London Plan after finding that several housing projects in west London had been delayed by data centres using all available grid capacity.
At the end of last month, campaigners staged two days of protests in London to highlight the dangers posed by the unchecked expansion of data centres to society and the environment.
Several large data centre and AI companies, including Microsoft and OpenAI, have introduced policies aimed at quelling concerns around the impact of the large-scale data centre build-outs they are planning.
