Digital Reef calls its London datacentre 'sustainable.' Its own filing says it is not on a 1.5C path.

Digital Reef wants to build Britain's largest datacentre on a 218-hectare stretch of protected countryside on the eastern edge of London. Its planning application calls the £14.7bn project (about $18.6bn at recent exchange rates) "a unique opportunity to create a sustainable datacentre campus of the future". The same application concedes the project "does not align with a science-based 1.5C compatible trajectory and achieving net zero by 2050." Environmental Statement.

Both statements sit in the developer's Environmental Statement, submitted as part of the East Havering Data Centre Campus (EHDCC) application now under public consultation with Havering Council. Together they spell out what one hyperscale facility, the warehouse-sized buildings that house the servers behind ChatGPT, government databases and streaming, would do to national climate maths when sized for 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year, every year, for 60 years.

The numbers in the application, summarised by the Romford Recorder and analysed by the Guardian, are unusually explicit for a UK infrastructure filing. Once fully operational, the campus would emit 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year, totalling 72 million tonnes over the 60-year lifespan. The Guardian's review of dozens of planning applications places that annual figure as the highest disclosed by any developer in the UK datacentre pipeline.

Translated through the UN's ICAO carbon calculator, 1.2 million tonnes equals roughly 26,795 long-haul flights between London Heathrow and New York JFK a year, the same number the Guardian rounded to 27,000. At the developer's projected 50% load, the campus would also draw 2.65 billion kWh of electricity a year, equivalent to the demand of more than one million UK households using Ofgem's average household consumption of 2,500 kWh a year.

Powering that draw is itself a multi-year, multi-billion-pound grid project. The site would connect through a 600MVA (megavolt-amperes, a measure of electrical capacity) line into the existing Warley substation, but only after National Grid builds a new 400kV substation and UK Power Networks adds a 132kV facility. National Grid's current timeline puts full connection at 2033, a decade after any planning decision, and the campus could be partly built before the wires that feed it exist.

The developer's own admission, in a section planners will weigh against the marketing claim, is the line that put the proposal in public view. The application "does not align with a science-based 1.5C compatible trajectory and achieving net zero by 2050," Digital Reef wrote. In a UK planning document, that phrasing is a concession by the applicant that the project as designed is incompatible with the country's statutory climate target.

Donald Campbell, called the disclosed emissions "staggering" and "a big threat to the ability to decarbonise in the UK" and "a big drain on important resources." The Guardian's "highest projected emissions disclosed by a developer" framing reflects the newspaper's own review of planning applications, not an independently audited UK ranking.

The North Ockendon Residents Association, representing the village closest to the proposed site, called the plan a "massacre" of green belt (the UK planning designation that protects open countryside around cities from development) and of "crop-producing farmland, in an age when we are threatened by security." The 218-hectare site is currently graded agricultural land inside the green belt, the very category London and its surrounds have used for decades to block exactly this kind of footprint.

The next decision sits with Havering Council, which is running the public consultation now. If councillors approve the scheme, the carbon profile of one of Europe's largest proposed datacentres will be locked in by planning consent while the 400kV substation that would power it is still years from completion. The "sustainable" branding will be the developer's defence in any future review; the 72-million-tonne record will be the planning file.