Watching grown men writhe about the pitch like worms on hot pavement is one of the most fascinating things about World Cup football.

If the theatrical production is to be believed, simply brushing past one of these elite male specimens would send them soaring through the air and rolling about the ground in agony. The performances are, of course, a ruse for the referee – an attempt to fool the official into awarding a free kick or a penalty.

The melodrama from business leaders about Scotland being ‘at risk of losing billions’ if we put a moratorium on building AI Data Centres reminds me of the FIFA divas. The truth is, plonking these humming, water-guzzling megastructures around the country without proper safeguards will cost us so much more. Scotland is in the throes of one of the most consequential planning and energy debates in modern history, and we have almost no national framework to handle the flood of proposals coming in.

This week, responding to the SNP’s plans to back a temporary ban on data centre developments, Sandy Begbie, the chief of Scottish Financial Enterprise, warned that a moratorium “would undermine economic growth and negatively impact investor sentiment towards Scotland”.

There are currently more than 24 proposals for new hyper-scale data centres across the country. If approved, the vast, windowless warehouses would use 6,000MW of electricity - more than one and a half times Scotland’s entire peak winter power demand. When pre-application consultations are included, Action to Protect Rural Scotland puts the figure closer to 11,200MW.

One proposal gives a pretty good indication of the dire situation we are facing. In May, ILI submitted plans for a 600MW data centre campus outside Auchtertool, a village of around 200 homes in Fife. The site would be the size of 100 football pitches, with up to six massive data halls. The bland concrete buildings would loom over the town like half a dozen tower blocks tipped on their sides, consuming the equivalent electricity of half........

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