The southern town’s concentration of more than 30 massive data centres has pushed up commercial emissions by 52pc since 2005 – making it the only place in the UK to see such a rapid rise in pollution.
Slough’s total emissions equate to five tonnes of CO2 for each of its citizens – far above the three tonnes per person seen in traditional industrial areas such as South Tyneside, the 3.7 tonnes recorded in Newcastle upon Tyne and the four tonnes recorded in Sunderland.
The figures come from the latest government data on the UK’s local and regional greenhouse gas statistics, which said Slough stood out from Britain’s other council authority areas.
“All but one of the UK’s 361 local authority areas have seen a reduction in commercial emissions since 2005,” said the report, covering emissions from 2005-2023.
The one authority that saw an increase is Slough, where commercial sector emissions increased by 52pc between 2005 and 2023. This increase may be because of the large number of data centres that have been built there.”
Even within the constraints of the normal Nut Zero shite this is nonsense. Where the emissions are produced means nothing. As with that argument over whether UK emissions should be measured by national production or national consumption – it’s consumption that matters, obviously. So too it will be about data centres.
Come on, it’s the basis of the entire argument – CO2 is the same everywhere…..
Perhaps each data centre has it’s own little power station.
Fuelled with lignite and peat.
It’s also cheap, and that you get clustering of expertise. You stick a data centre in Slough or Swindon because there’s companies around them that do all the specific tasks.
Indeed, you put new lab space in Cambridge if you can because that’s where the existing expertise is. Some junior managers know how to set up a new company and build them, someone there knows how to train the staff, the supply chain and connections are present.
For Slough, build an SMR.
That assumes they’re making an honest argument Tim. We’re way past that with these people.
Martin,
There’s all sorts of playing around here, like talking in percentage differences, listing places that have been deindustrialised.
Also, while Slough has lots of greenery around it, the borough is not much more than the town. It might look worse than say, Swindon because Swindon includes lots of villages with people living in them without much industry where those are in another local authority for Slough.
Doesn’t Slough have a whacking great power station in the middle of the Industrial Estate…?
Wonder if not being reliant on unreliables is part of the attraction in having a data centre based there.
Nah. CO2 is different if emitted elsewhere.
Otherwise wed need to admit that we havent actually reduced pollution, just exported it to India and China. By exporting it we actually also increased it.
Also data centres (typically) help reduce emissions elsewhere as you can optimise transports of goods, do more WFH, etc
Martin Near The M25 sums it up perfectly with “That assumes they’re making an honest argument“.
Doesn’t matter whether you offshore CO2 emissions, that DCs allow remote working etc (so reduce CO2 elsewhere), the message to be rammed down the plebs throats is that all modern life is bad because it uses energy from fossil fuel sources.
Those heightened CO2 emissions must be making Slough a green jungle.
Emil. Optimise & WFH in the same sentence? Optimise what?
‘All but one of the UK’s 361 local authority areas have seen a reduction in commercial emissions since 2005,” said the report, covering emissions from 2005-2023.’
They have produced economic contraction in all but one jurisdiction. So the knives are out.
“They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast.”
“No, no, no! No new business in England! It must go to France or somewhere else!”
‘said Slough’s surging commercial emissions showed it was becoming a success story’
I have never heard it put so starkly: Leake/Telegraph are literally saying emissions are more important the commercial success. The new national anthem.
@BiS
There are plenty of jobs where WFH makes perfect sense, and economically productive ones, too (even if they don’t involve carpentry, plumbing or brick-laying (or prostitution)). Software development is a very obvious case, while my nephew works in engineering design, and rarely needs to visit the head office, even though he’s only a few miles away in outer London.
Of course, the pendulum has swung too far in favour of WFH, but that’s just what pendulums do.
Bloke in Spain,
“Emil. Optimise & WFH in the same sentence? Optimise what?”
I know two software entrepreneurs who continued WFH after Covid because they noticed no difference. I haven’t worked in an office since Covid. WFH was what the Victorian watchmakers did. Someone dropped off metal and they were paid for the number of springs they made. The people I work for know what I’m doing for them. They can measure that. No-one stands over a mechanic servicing their car.
For me, it’s about optimising for me, or my client. They need an urgent job, I don’t mind working until 9pm if I don’t have to arse about getting on a train at 6. I might have a quiet bit of the day, I’ll go get some shopping and do some work later when maybe someone has sent me something I need.
The two big things with WFH: a) people who can’t measure their staff, and rely on people being present, which is bollocks b) government departments that don’t work their staff hard enough. In the case of b) this is nothing new. Government functions are often a doss, but people have only noticed it with WFH because some staff are managing to add a second government job.
Chris Miller,
“Software development is a very obvious case, while my nephew works in engineering design, and rarely needs to visit the head office, even though he’s only a few miles away in outer London.”
I classify office work into two groups: people doing the basic stuff and people doing the specialist stuff.
The people doing the basic stuff like call centres and boring admin still go to work. You don’t need to pick a particular place for basic stuff. You can do it anywhere. So, for 20+ years, the offices of basic work have been in cheap places like Swansea, Wrexham and Peterborough. You can get people to do work in those places, and they’re cheap, and because they’re cheap, they’re also cheap to live in. People working at a call centre in Swansea don’t care about going to the office. It’s 10 minutes from home.
Everything else is specialist stuff, and historically, you got clusters of people. Cities like Manchester and London were useful because of their size and rail network. You needed a particular specialist in the office, you could more easily get them in each day than if your office was in say, Banbury. Certain types of specialist created a network around a place, like insurance in Bristol, software in Reading. It’s like the physical thing of cobblers around the east of Northants, F1 teams around the west of Northants.
Once you get remote work, all that specialist stuff just doesn’t matter so much where you are. Your team doing actuarial reports can be almost anywhere. Your team that writes the website blurb are the same. We’ve got workflows in Content Management Systems of submit for approval. Jane in Devizes makes the initial work, Sandra in Gloucester approves it and up it goes.
It’s why London house price growth is lagging the rest of the UK. Other than tea at the Ritz and Les Miserables, what does London export? It’s not JCBs or lady’s frillies. It’s spreadsheet jockey work and you can do it almost anywhere. So why do it in a really expensive place? Demand for housing is falling as a result. Greater London house prices have risen 11% in 10 years, compared to 24% for the UK.
…and always the picture of cooling tower vapour that (ignorant – and kept that way by the media) readers will conflate with smoke, which is not seen to be coming out of the chimney, by the way.
As has been said, you think you hate the media enough, but you don’t.
all modern life is bad because it uses energy
from fossil fuel sources.Fixed that for you.
Further to WB’s comments on location… of the mobile networks Cellnet (O2) set up in Slough and Vodafone in Newbury, then a few years later Microtel (Orange) set up in Almondsbury, at the M4/M5 junction, and 1-2-1 (deceased) set up in Borehamwood. Then along came 3 and they set up in Maidenhead.
Only 1-2-1 had difficulty recruiting.
CM & WB
I can understand WFH where the work output is measurable. Outworking has a long & successful history. Prevalent in the garment trade & indeed watch assembly. Known as piecework.
Interesting that you mention prostitution in connection with WFH because it’s an excellent example of why some activities aren’t suitable for WFH. They are paid by their clients for the time spent with them & the payment is made at the time & place of service. Normally cash. The employer is then entitled to a portion of the client fee. So the employer needs to know how long she has worked. If it was left to her, she could say that she saw 3 clients for half an hour having actually seen 6 clients for an hour each. They would be defrauding their employer out of 75% of their income.
Which exactly what so many clerical WFH’ers have been doing. Using time they’ve said they were working to do other things. What proportion? Seems to be pretty high if not all of them. Unsupervised work is rarely optimum.
BiS
You would have noted that I merely said that you can do more WFH with data centres than without, which I’m pretty certain will save on transports and therefore on CO2. I did not enter the debate on whether WFH was efficient or on whether less transports is good.
Used to live in Slough. Had a cracking view of the power station. Provided low-grade heat to the Mars factory next-door, too. It runs on pelletised cardboard — originally packaging waste from the trading estate, but expanded to household waste. We had a separate wheelie-bin in the flats for paper’n’card which went to the pelletisation plant next to the power station.
I’m not sure where RightThink is with biomass at the moment, but the cardboard burns pretty cleanly — hence you never see smoke coming out the chimney — and non-toxic post-consumer waste that’s been transported less than 5 miles has got to be just about the ‘greenest’ fuel going. When you look at the amount of water and bleaches that are avoided by burning paper instead of recycling it, it’s a major win for those who actually care about the environment (as opposed to those who use it as an excuse to turn you into Soylent green).
BIS,
“I can understand WFH where the work output is measurable. Outworking has a long & successful history. Prevalent in the garment trade & indeed watch assembly. Known as piecework.”
We don’t pay by the fix, but we know what work someone has done. You work in a software team, we do a fortnightly meeting, carve up the work and the team agrees a number of points per task. Then a manager can see who is doing what work. They also know if someone had a tough thing that took longer, or lent a hand on something. We have tools like Jira and VS Devops that manage it.
“Which exactly what so many clerical WFH’ers have been doing. Using time they’ve said they were working to do other things. What proportion? Seems to be pretty high if not all of them. Unsupervised work is rarely optimum.”
The real problem is the public sector, and this isn’t a WFH problem. I’ve seen things in the public sector that some people wouldn’t believe.
It’s that lots of managers don’t care about working their people hard, and that it’s almost impossible to fire people problem. The whole thing of people taking on 2 jobs is because a lot of people barely have any work. They CAN manage two full-time public sector jobs and now no manager is walking past, they are. They just couldn’t manage it in the office before. They’d have filled half their days with chatting up girls or goofing on Twitter. it’s why people aren’t getting caught by managers noticing they aren’t working, which is what you’d expect, that they can’t handle both jobs. It’s auditors looking for matches.