A new survey of UK voters has found strong support for new legislation around large scale IT facilities to stop them dominating energy and water supplies.
There are currently 497 online data centres across Britain, with around 100 more in planning or development stage. The scale, and therefore footprint, of these sites is increasing rapidly to meet demands created by more sophisticated computer systems and networks, and artificial intelligence.
Now polling commissioned by Beyond Fossil Fuels and carried out by Savanta, with support from international partners including Global Action Plan, has shown widespread concerns about these tech hubs. 88% of people want to see full transparency about their environmental impact, 82% would like the government to introduce criteria to determine how energy is prioritised and distributed between industries, sectors, and services – including during peak demand when the risk of shortages is heightened.
Public sector demand from healthcare and defence, alongside housing and residential, agricultural and food should also be prioritised over Big Tech. In order to avoid needs outpacing supply, 77% of voters say new data centres should only be approved with renewable energy sources to support them, and more than three-quarters said all new facilities should be powered by clean electricity.
Adding to the evidence that the public does not want to see its parliamentary representatives push on with data centre expansion ‘at all cost’, 70% of those in the survey would be concerned about the affect on water and power supplies if data centres opened in their area. However, overall knowledge around these facilities is comparatively low – just 49% of the public are familiar with the term ‘data centre’, below German, Spanish, Irish, and Swiss citizens.
‘When confronted with the stark reality, UK citizens clearly grasp what their government won’t: data centres deliver private gain for public pain,’ said Oliver Hayes, Head of Policy & Campaigns, Global Action Plan UK.
‘The UK is a nation of climate advocates who know greenwash when they see it,’ he continued. ‘Ministers who think they can quietly heed Big Tech’s demands for priority access to energy and water in service of chatbots and AI slop are in for a shock. This polling couldn’t be clearer: the public expect Big Tech to pay for new renewables and grid upgrades, and for their activities to be in service of, not jeopardising, critical industries like housing and healthcare.’
Image: Geoffrey Moffett / Unsplash
More Data Management:
National ID cards will support mass surveillance, not security
Chinese councils briefed on AI and data, so what about Britain?
Leave a Reply