Caroline Lucas

speaker

487 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Caroline Lucas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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The Rest Is Politics · Data Centres vs. Drinking Water: What Matters To Us Most? · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

So Olly, there seems to be a huge amount of controversy just about some of the basic facts about how much water these AI data centers really need.

So you've got some people saying that the demands have been massively overstated.

You've got other people saying they're really underestimated.

So why is it so difficult to get accurate data on this?

I guess the picture is really affected by the fact of where these data centers actually are.

I was reading one of your reports, I think, that around 84% of proposed sites are in areas that are projected to be water stressed by 2040.

Is that the reason that some of these estimates come up with a very low figure for the amount

nationally that data centres are using in terms of water, because in fact, once you average it out across the whole country, yes, the figure might look very small, but in actual fact, quite a lot of these data centres are concentrated in water-stressed areas.

Yeah, I do find it shocking that, as you say, that we don't even know, or even some of these water companies themselves don't know how much the data centres are using.

Why isn't there legislation?

I understand in the EU, for example, they are bringing in requirements that data centres should report, for example, their freshwater consumption.

One of the factors in all of this that I hadn't fully appreciated was that when the government designated AI data centres as national critical infrastructure back in 2024, that essentially means, doesn't it, that water companies are now legally unable to disconnect to, for example, AI data centres, even at times of real water stress.

In a sense, those data centres are going to be taking water potentially before ordinary householders, for example.

Yeah, exactly.

And I was struck about the irony of the government just very recently launching a new, I think it's a 75 million pound publicity campaign to try to persuade the public to use less water.

And so you've got this kind of situation where we are all being urged to take shorter showers, essentially so that AI data centers can go on guzzling as much water as they like.

And what about technological advances?

To what extent is it the case that if we were being a little bit stricter about the kinds of water that they're using, for example, using wastewater or using closed loop systems where they're using less water, how much difference can those technological changes actually make?

And just the last sort of reflection in a way, do you think that environmental breakdown itself could become a kind of overlooked constraint on the technological growth here?

So for people who are sort of very gung-ho about wanting to see the expansion of AI and the data centers, and they want the UK to be at the forefront of this race,

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