Concerns raised over planned data centre on the outskirts of Reading
The development is planned for Thames Valley Park
Thousands of people have signed a petition against a proposed data centre at a business park on the outskirts of Reading.
This summer, an early-stage plan emerged to build a data centre at Thames Valley Park in Earley.
The facility would replace three office buildings occupied by Microsoft in the eastern portion of the site.
The plan was exhibited at Pearsons Hall, Sonning, in July, with some people expressing serious reservations about the resource demands and environmental impacts it could have.
Thousands have signed a petition started by Jenna Graby on Change.org urging the project to be scrapped.
One of her arguments was that allowing any company to use the facility posed a risk to data security.
She states: “The public consultation confirmed that if this data centre is built, it could be leased by any company that needs a data storage facility. The UK has legislation when it comes to processing data: mainly the Data Protection Act (2018) and UK GDPR.
“However, some foreign data integrity procedures conflict with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act, because they require back-end access to any data that is collected eg Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
“It would be impossible to enforce UK legislation with international companies, therefore, it is a data security risk to the UK public to have a shared infrastructure.
“Wokingham and the surrounding area is functioning in the digital age without issue: good internet coverage and access to ‘cloud services’, ‘internet banking’ and ‘digital health care services’.
“Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud already have dedicated capacity in England. So, there is no shortage of computer capacity on UK soil.
“What is this data centre offering that we don’t already have?”
There are also concerns about how the facility will be cooled, particularly if water is used.
Ms Graby stated: “Water, energy and transport are essential. Data centres, however, are not essential to our lives as humans.
“In fact, given the detrimental impact to the environmental infrastructure and ecology, they are actively harmful to humans.”
She also argued that there is a lack of need for data centres as facilities have been established in Swindon, Slough and Didcot.
So far, the petition has received 4,084 signatures. You can sign it on the Change.org website.
Details of the project are provided on the Thames Valley Park Data Centre website and its frequently asked questions section.
On cooling, the website states: “Similar to how a car’s radiator removes heat to keep the engine running smoothly, our proposed air-cooling system would continuously remove heat from the servers. Water will carry the heat from the data rooms to chillers on the roof where it will be cooled by air. The water circulates in a closed loop, meaning once operational, the data centre will require minimal new water.”
The project team also argued that the visual impact of the data centre would be limited as the business park is already a built-up area, and the project would deliver a minimum of 10 per cent biodiversity net gain on site.
The team aim to submit a planning application to Wokingham Borough Council this autumn.