Lisa Ryan

And there are significant jobs.

Now, some of those jobs, I think at least half those jobs come from the construction sector.

So arguably now some of those are very specialised construction jobs.

It has to be said they might necessarily be.

uh you know able to switch into retrofitting homes or building houses but there are a lot of construction jobs that probably we would like to have also in the housing sector and they do they have generated a lot of benefits of course they have the question is should we keep going and there's more than a dozen right now in the pipeline for example and this is going to put a significant strain it also means that any additional renewable electricity that's coming online

it's more or less being completely taken up by the data centres.

And even when we have the offshore wind in the future, it again is not going to, we need long duration storage.

So if you could persuade the new data centres coming on that they would have very flexible demand or that they would, as we see in Tala happening, that they're providing heat and we're having district heating systems so that the excess heat, so all these other pieces that could come with them,

then I think there'll be something to discuss.

But right now, it seems to be a little bit one-sided, even with the new large energy users bill that has been brought through that says that they have to have 80% renewable electricity.

There is, because if you have an increased demand, so if you have an increased demand for electricity, it shifts the whole supply curve to the right.

That's the economics terms.

But it does mean that, you know, on a day where we might have mainly wind, but then that last piece has to be fulfilled using gas generation.

Maybe we wouldn't need that gas generation on those days if we didn't have the data centre.

So every time you're increasing your demand, you're more likely to have to do gas.

And as we know, gas...

Prices are very high, very volatile, and they're the ones that have been pushing our electricity prices up.

So I could reference the Friends of the Earth Commission report last week.

They showed that consumers are paying additional amounts because of data centres.

And it's just basically about this demand increasing all the time, and that will cause higher prices.