After a slew of major tech announcements this week, new developments in Edinburgh give it a chance to grasp the opportunities big data offers, writes Herald columnist John McLellan.

If not quite revolutionary, it was still billed as a “major milestone” for the vast regeneration scheme at Edinburgh’s Granton waterfront, the signing of a deal to develop a system to generate heat for over 3000 new homes from sewage.

The Swedish state energy company Vattenfall was given a budget of around £750,000 to produce the plan which would then go to tender, and while it might have been a bit much to expect the first radiators to be glowing from poop power by now, nearly two years on the plan has yet to materialise.

All a council spokesman could say was that a report would be going to the next finance and resources committee in the middle of November.

Whether energy firms can be flush from your flush or not, district heating systems are complex, and prohibitively expensive to retrofit in built-up areas, particularly those dominated by Victorian tenements. But that didn’t stop the SNP, when still in the grip of the disastrous Bute House Agreement with the Greens, from demanding a Local Heating and Energy Efficiency Strategy (LHEES) from every authority to show how communities could be decarbonised.

“The Edinburgh LHEES will not be deliverable using public funds alone,” said the 2023 report which accompanied Edinburgh’s strategy, and in what was code for “we’ve no money and this is totally bonkers and unaffordable” it commented that, “The........

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