Britain's Greens want data centres demoted from critical infrastructure mid-drought

The two water numbers in this fight measure different things, which is why both sides can cite them honestly. The Water Research Centre's February estimate, roughly 1.9 billion litres of drinkable water a year for England's data centres, or 0.2% of the non-household market ^[7], works out at about 5.2 million litres a day across the entire sector ^[18]. The Global Action Plan figure the Greens prefer puts a single large facility at up to 1.5 million litres a day ^[8], which annualises to 547.5 million litres, so England's whole metered sector amounts to roughly three and a half of the Greens' buildings ^[19]. A sector total at the meter measures something different from a per-site ceiling, and both figures can hold. That 0.2% share, incidentally, implies a non-household market of around 950 billion litres a year ^[20], which is the denominator doing most of the reassuring.

The carbon side is more tractable, and more revealing about method. Foxglove's projection for Wapseys Wood in Buckinghamshire and Quest Park in Bedfordshire, more than 4.5 million tonnes a year at full operating capacity on 1.3GW of draw ^[9], sits about 15% above the 3.9 million tonnes Ember attributes to ExxonMobil's entire UK operation in 2023 ^[11][21]. Run 1.3GW flat out and you get 11.4 TWh a year, so 4.5 million tonnes implies something near 395 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour ^[22], an assumption about the electricity these halls will buy, a variable that shifts with grid mix rather than a fixed property of the halls. It is the exact term the senior Labour official was reaching for in conceding the designation is "not a blank cheque for Big Tech" and that developers must use clean power, manage water responsibly and invest in host communities ^[15].

For anyone underwriting a British site, the 2024 designation ^[5] is worth less as a subsidy line than as a ranking. The Greens' objection is that these facilities would come ahead of homes for water and electricity in a shortage ^[6], which is another way of saying the status is an availability assumption, and availability is what a colocation contract actually sells. Demote it in a summer the Green Party says has three quarters of the country scrambling for consistent supply ^[23], and the uptime story gets rewritten before any covenant does.

The counter-thesis is strong. Polanski stopped short of a full moratorium ^[14], his party does not hold the pen, and Whitehall has dug in on jobs and data sovereignty ^[13]. Neil Ross of Public First reads UK opposition as local and environmental where American anger is about household bills ^[16], and local objections travel through planning committees rather than statute, which is the slower route, or rather the more expensive one, because it lands on named schemes and specific months. This is probably wrong, but I would price a water reporting duty here, since Toby Perkins chairs a Commons inquiry that has already framed the issue as missing safeguards ^[12], and disclosure is the cheapest safeguard to legislate; a freeze looks like the less likely outcome. If the consents at Wapseys Wood and Quest Park land on schedule and the designation survives that inquiry intact, I was pricing noise.