Starmer wants high-tech investment in the UK that will demand massive new electricity supply and water supplies we simply have not got, and all for not many new jobs. Why doesn’t he grow UK small business instead?
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Amazon wants to build data centres in the UK, and it’s not alone. There will be plenty of other companies who want to do these things to handle the consequences of AI. But can we afford to have them in this country?
I ask for two really big reasons. The first is that, although not yet widely understood, AI is going to absorb lots of energy. That artificial intelligence does not come for free. The cost is in terms of significant new amounts of electricity that must be generated to meet the demand for all these data centres that will process this supposed intelligence, which would otherwise be supplied by us human beings. So, that’s the first cost that Amazon is going to impose upon this country.
And what we already know in the UK is that our National Grid is creaking. What I mean by saying it is creaking, is that it cannot meet current demand both for new inputs into the system, which can’t be connected, apparently, for years to come because of the inefficiencies within the National Grid, which means they cannot connect up new power sources, or for outputs from the system, meaning that companies who want to be supplied with electricity are sitting waiting for the supply to be installed, which is also, by the way, a constraint on new house building.
So, Keir Starmer’s massive plan to bring data centres amongst many other high-tech industries that he wants to be located in the UK is actually going to make our national infrastructure worse.
But, there’s another way in which Amazon will impose an enormous demand on the UK by building these data centres. And that is by asking for more water. Because when you generate more heat, which these data centres will do, you require more water to cool the systems down. This is not marginal heat we’re talking about here, it’s the sort of heat that used to be created by power stations, and there was a very good reason why they, when they were located inland, were next to rivers, and that was because they needed river water to cool them.
Now, are we willing to put up with the heat pollution to our water supplies that Amazon will create as a consequence? We already know there are major problems with water supply in the UK. For example, there was a recent report saying that businesses in Suffolk cannot get new water supplies installed to meet their needs to grow their businesses because the local water company says that it cannot find the water resources in question, partly because, by law, those water resources are going to have to be diverted to Sizewell C Power Station, which, although it sits next to the sea, will not be able to use salt water to cool its reactors, and will instead require extra freshwater resources for that purpose, which will then be pumped into the sea and be lost for good.
This is another potential creaking part of our infrastructure. We know that water is already failing.
But these new investments that Keir Starmer is trumpeting are going to make electricity and water look much more vulnerable. And yet, who’s going to make the investment to turn them around and make them fit for, well, the late 20th century, let alone the 21st century?
No one knows.
We are quite certain that the water companies do not have the resources to already supply us with water that is fit for consumption and, at the same time, manage our rivers, streams, and beaches in a way that prevents them being deeply polluted by human waste. We know already that many of our rivers are polluted by existing industries.
For example, the River Wye in the West Country is heavily polluted by the runoff from chicken farming in particular in that area. We know that other rivers and streams are not improving in quality as we would hope. In other words, we know that the demand for investment is already enormous in these sectors.
And we know that National Grid is simply not keeping up.
So why are we planning to bring new industries to this country that our infrastructure cannot support and which must actually impose constraints on existing domestic growth if we are to encourage this foreign direct investment? I genuinely don’t know.
But I can say one thing with certainty. And that is that Keir Starmer does not seem to have thought this through. It would be much better to grow jobs in the UK based upon smaller, more local, more diverse businesses that have lower levels of energy demand than it would be by doing the sort of thing that he’s doing – high-ticket items with massive energy demand for relatively low numbers of jobs created and with high levels of pollution risk, both from energy generation and from river pollution. We really do need a joined-up industrial policy for this country, and Labour is not delivering it.