Part 2: Scotland’s DIESEL Powered AI Data Centres

Let’s hope the Artificial Intelligence engines bring a better class of thinking to energy policy than we’ve seen from this Scottish Government.

I can literally feel shifts in the energy market.
No, I don’t have a mystic crystal hanging round my neck - I live next to the East Coast Railway line.

Most of the time I barely hear the electric trains passing.
It’s a different story when the price of electricity rises above diesel. That incentivises operators to switch to fossil fuel instead.
These replacement dinosaur locomotives roar past like a Tyrannosaurus Rex with toothache. I can smell the exhaust fumes as they go by.

So what does this have to do with AI data centres?

In Part 1, I explained why I support building AI data centres in Scotland.
In a recent post, I also set out why Scotland’s guaranteed energy capacity is inadequate for our needs.

Put the two together and the natural conclusion is to equip AI data centres with diesel back-up power. That way, if renewable output dips, there’s no need to raid the national grid for scarce electricity.

All large data centres operate under service level agreements (SLAs), typically “four nines” - meaning 99.99% uptime. That’s critical for business applications, as customers are refunded for unacceptable downtime.

The problem is that the weather doesn’t operate under an SLA with the National Grid. Any AI data centre in Scotland relying on renewable energy risks a service default when the wind isn’t blowing. That’s why most of the world’s AI data centres draw power from gas-backed grids.

Scotland is awash with relatively clean-burning natural gas. Yet we have just one gas-fired power station in Peterhead, and no more are planned. As a nation, we are top-heavy with renewable generation but light on firm capacity.

The answer is diesel back-up - just as the NHS uses in many hospitals. The hidden problem is the same as with the trains: when electricity prices rise, the temptation to run entirely on diesel grows.

UK industrial energy prices are currently twice those in France and four times those in the USA. At those levels, running Scotland’s new data centres on diesel may look commercially attractive. No wonder Aggreko - the Scottish kings of diesel generation hire - are returning to the stock exchange.

The real risk is that, alongside 17 proposed data centres, we quietly build 17 diesel-fired power stations.

Let’s hope the Artificial Intelligence engines bring a better class of thinking to energy policy than we’ve seen from this Scottish Government.