Letters: Datacentres should generate their own power and control their emissions, writes Richard Lamming , while Michael McClelland says we should reduce our digital communication. Plus a letter from Malcolm Fraser
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The Guardian31 Aug 2026, 04:10 pmUpdated 21h ago3 min readUK newsUK news
UK news — The Guardian
How to tackle the climate impact of datacentres
The case of future datacentres demanding more electricity than the entire United Kingdom ( Two planned datacentres will have higher UK carbon emissions than ExxonMobil, analysis finds, 25 August ) is an example of corporates transferring their problems to society and the electorate. This must not be allowed to happen.
One solution would be to make each datacentre responsible for generating all its own electricity and for reducing its CO 2 emissions to zero. These installations will have vast areas of roofing and car parks that could be covered in solar panels, space for wind generation and battery storage, and for emissions scrubbers.
If the corporate response is that this is not possible, that is their problem, not ours. Perhaps some innovation is called for.
• You report on the cost of a proposed new “hyperscale” datacentre in Havering, east London, in terms of its likely carbon footprint ( Proposed London datacentre ‘incompatible’ with net zero with 1m-tonne carbon footprint, 21 August ) – though the article doesn’t mention the huge use of water, which seems ironic in a period of drought. Locals and others are quite rightly up in arms about this and indeed many other datacentres that have been built or are under development.
Nevertheless, we should all consider our own culpability here. Datacentres exist because we want to send, receive and store digital communications. Understandable enough, but a huge quantity of digital data is either junk or unnecessary. Research suggests that if each person in this country sent one less “thank-you” email a day, there would be an annual saving of more than 16,000 tonnes of CO 2 . We can all contribute to reducing and managing the problem. A structure of small charges by the government for digital communications would deter us all from generating junk. We pay to post letters, why not for digital communication?
• If AI is so clever, it should be required to design itself datacentres that do not command all our water and energy before we let its oligarchs build.
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One solution would be to make each datacentre responsible for generating all its own electricity and for reducing its CO 2 emissions to zero. These installations will have vast areas of roofing and car parks that could be covered in solar panels, space for wind generation and battery storage, and for emissions scrubbers.
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Source: The Guardian. Published 31 Aug 2026, 04:10 pm.
