We sent this email to the First Minister of Scotland on 27.4.28.
PLEASE take onboard the SEVERITY of this information and the impact it would have on our all our lives, our beautiful green farmland, the Union Canal and our precious countryside.
Dear First Minister,
I am writing on behalf of West Edinburgh Against Data Centres and the 1,100 residents who have signed our petition to express grave concern regarding the proposed hyperscale data centres at Wester Hermiston (25/03978/PAN) and The Gyle (24/02073/FUL).
We urge you to intervene and issue a National Direction for these applications. They represent a "Hydrological and Grid Overdraft" that threatens the stability of Scotland’s central belt infrastructure and public health.
1. These two data centres will draw as much power as 1.4 million Scottish households—more than the combined total of every home in Edinburgh and Glasgow. This is an unsustainable monopoly on a public utility during a housing and energy crisis.
2. Hydrological Crisis: Independent audits indicate a demand of 3.6 billion litres of potable water annually for these two sites—equivalent to the consumption of a city the size of Perth. Using drinking-quality water as an industrial coolant is a significant resource allocation failure.
3. Public Health Risk: To ensure 100% uptime, each site will install over 60 industrial diesel generators. Each is equivalent to over 106,000 idling diesel cars, over 200,000 cars idling between the two of them, releasing concentrated Nitrogen Oxides and toxic PM2.5 particulates over residential areas and the Union Canal.
4. Technical Obsolescence: The City of Edinburgh Council has failed to require an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the Wester Hermiston site. This ignores the transition to hardware designed to run significantly hotter, requiring even greater energy and water for cooling than current proposals suggest.
We urge you to support a moratorium on hyperscale data centres until a scientifically-defensible definition of "Green Data Centres" is established within NPF4. At a minimum, we ask that you "Call In" these applications to ensure they are subjected to the rigorous national scrutiny that Critical National Infrastructure demands.
The people of West Edinburgh are standing against resource bankruptcy and a public health crisis.
Yours sincerely,
Gordon Fraser
On behalf of West Edinburgh Against Data Centres
Petition: https://c.org/vYV5Qfq72k
Website: sites.google.com/foot-logic.co.uk/data-centre