The government needs to keep track of the water and energy use in the UK’s data centres to ensure the sector is growing in a sustainable way, a report has urged.
Data centres typically use water for cooling purposes as heat can be dissipated through evaporation, which is more energy efficient than air conditioning. They also consume a significant amount of energy to keep large numbers of servers online.
But, in a new report, the National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC) has urged the government to ensure companies are accurately reporting the environmental impact of their data centres as the sector grows rapidly, in large part because of the broad adoption of AI services. It said data centres should be designed to use a minimal amount of water and critical raw materials.
The government is intending to reform the planning system to build new infrastructure such as data centres, but the NEPC said it must implement policies designed to manage their environmental risks.
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