This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

One of the arguments in favour of Scotland becoming host to a slew of giant, hyperscale data centres is that they can help solve our increasingly costly problem of curtailed wind, which cost us £363 million in payments, according to Montel, and over £1 billion when the cost of turning on gas power stations is factored in.

Pop a massive data centre on the system, we are effectively being told, and all those wind farms that we might have had to stop turning because the electricity has nowhere to go can be useful again.

When I was working on last week’s series, The Future of AI and Data Centres, almost every developer I was in contact with pointed out the benefits that could be brought in terms of reducing curtailment.

These energy-guzzling facilities, the biggest of which have electricity demands on a par with aluminium smelters, historically our most voracious consumers, somehow end up being a mind-boggling answer along our journey to net zero.

But are they? Or are they the wrong answer, and in the wrong place?

As was revealed at a recent Holyrood committee evidence session by Dr Callum MacIver, a research fellow at the University of Strathclyde, there is an issue with the current data centre proposals. All, as far as I can tell from published information, but one of the 28 that are in NESO's grid queue (representing 8.9GW capacity) would be in the wrong place, too far south, for this to be most effective.

How did this happen? Because curtailment isn’t what data centre developers had their eyes on. They were looking for large, reliable grid connections and digital/transport connectivity.

Whilst Dr MacIver does indeed support the idea that there is scope for data centres to help manage the constraints problem in Scotland, he also tells me, “when you dig into the detail over the next few years, it's likely that they would be most helpful the further north they are”.

"That's not to say there's........

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