The small town fighting plans for data centre size of 50 football pitches

A 50-acre data centre that could use more power than 300,000 homes has been proposed on the edge of a small town in Scotland.

Over 2,000 people have submitted objections to the hyperscale data centre in Larbert, with residents raising concerns such as air pollution, noise and impacts on the grid.

It’s the latest in a string of data centres that have been proposed across Scotland’s central belt, prompting a growing backlash and demand for tougher regulation from the Scottish Government.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

“We’ve got these sites coming up all over Scotland,” said Larbert resident Tasha Marsden. “I think the government needs to sit with this and actually bring in some sort of standards and legislation about these hyperscale sites.”

The 300-megawatt data centre planned for Larbert, which has a population of around 12,000, would occupy a 50-acre site on the edge of the town, which has been vacant for 30 years.

Marsden described Larbert as a “quiet, peaceful” place with “views all the way across the Ochils”.
She questioned whether the site was an appropriate place for a giant data centre, which houses servers running round the clock to power artificial intelligence and other web services.

Data centres use huge amounts of power; if approved, the site in Larbert would have a maximum capacity of 300 megawatts, which is the same amount of power as all the homes in Glasgow use in one year.

“Just the sheer amount of energy that it’s going to need to run is just insane… where’s that energy coming from?” Marsden said.

Some developers argue that Scotland is the perfect location for data centres, as its abundance of renewable energy means the warehouses can be run on clean energy.

The country often generates more wind power than it can use locally and grid constraints mean that wind farms often have to be turned off to avoid generating too much power.

However, the wind power being developed in Scotland is earmarked for decarbonising the UK’s existing energy demand and the grid is being upgraded to handle the full capacity.

This means the benefits of using data centres to absorb additional demand would be “short-term”, said Keith Bell, Professor in Electrical Engineering at Strathclyde University.

Alongside the energy demand, residents of Larbert are concerned about air pollution as the data centre will have 200 back-up diesel generators that will be tested at regular intervals, according to the planning application.

“The diesel generators are going to generate huge amounts of noxious exhaust chemicals,” said Michael Maciocia, who lives less than one kilometre away from the proposed site.
He said it was “lunacy” to put a site like this so close to where people lived.

There are currently only 15 data centres in Scotland, but at least 24 additional sites are currently in the planning system, according to research by Action to Protect Rural Scotland.

The vast majority of these are in the central belt, in towns that have lost thousands of jobs due to the decline in industry.

Both the Scottish and UK Governments have pitched AI as a crucial tenet of the country’s future economy, helping to boost productivity and scale British businesses.

The Larbert site’s developer, Apatura, said the data centre will create 515 permanent jobs in the wider Falkirk area, including 297 on-site.

However, local residents are sceptical of these figures; data centres are highly automated and employ a low number of people relative to their size.

More widely, the opposition to data centres is fuelled by a general distrust of big tech and, what Macicioa describes, as the industry’s “marketing bullshit”.

As a minimum, campaigners in Scotland are calling on the Scottish Government to set out strict rules for data centres that ensure they are built to high environmental standards.

The Scottish Government had said publicly that it supports “green” data centres, but has not set out a definition of what that means.

Earlier this week, Scottish First Minister John Swinney said he was giving “active consideration to whether the Scottish Government should provide planning guidance to balance the rapid expansion of hyperscale data centres with national energy and climate goals”.