CO2 Emissions From Google Data Centres

This might not be wholly true, you know?

Dastardly, right dastardly:

Developers working for Google have significantly misstated how much carbon two proposed AI datacentres will contribute to the UK’s total emissions in planning documents reviewed by the Guardian.

The tech company wants to build two huge datacentres – one 52-hectare (130 acre) project in Thurrock and another at an airfield in North Weald, both in Essex. To do so, developers are required to submit planning documents calculating how much carbon these projects will emit as a proportion of the UK’s total carbon footprint.

In both cases, they appear to have compared one year of the proposed datacentre’s emissions with the UK’s entire five-year carbon budget, understating the significance of their emissions by a factor of five, according to experts at the tech justice nonprofit Foxglove.

And, well, no?

I can’t really think of anything a data centre does that produces emissions. I do really rather doubt this.

Looking at the webpage of the people making the claim they seem to be against data centres because. CO2 is just one of their excuses that is.

But they say this:

The council’s own documents stated that “peak annual Scope 2 emissions” caused by the data centre will reach 1,004,478 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) in the year 2033-34. Scope 2 emissions in this case are the climate pollution that will be caused generating the electricity which will power the data centre.

And, no, that’s not right. Scope 1 is your suppliers, Scope 2 is your actions, Scope 3 is emissions from customers using your product. The electricity is being bought in - it’s Scope 1 emissions.

This is not a problem of a or even of any data centre. This is a problem of MadEd not having got us to a non-fossil fuel electricity system yet. But, as we know, he’s working on it and isn’t it all supposed to be happening by 2035 or summat?

These emissions come from the electricity supply system. So, the problem is in the electricity supply system, not the data centre.

Now, yes, much about climate change is nonsense anyway but it would be more useful if these people could manage to keep their lies straight, right?

The problem here is MadEd, not Google. But then that’s a rubric of more general use too….