Why are thousands of people opposing a new data centre?

Nearly 5,000 people have signed a petition against plans for a data centre in countryside close to Norwich. What exactly is proposed, and what do opponents and backers of the scheme say?

The seven-acre (three-hectare) Norwich Apex Data Centre would be built on land being turned into a business park at Keswick, just south of Norwich, close to nature sites including Marston Marsh.

A packed-out meeting in the village on Tuesday heard more about the plans, ahead of an application due to be submitted to South Norfolk District Council soon.

Data centres are giant warehouses full of powerful computers used to run digital services, from movie streaming to online banking.

Experts estimated there were about 477 data centres in the UK last year, with the number due to increase by about a fifth in the coming years.

AI systems, which require a huge amount of data to be processed very quickly, are driving demand for them.

By some analyses, the UK is already the third-largest nation for data centres behind the US and Germany and the government has made it clear it believes they are central to the UK's economic future, designating them critical national infrastructure.

But there are concerns about their impact due to the huge amount of energy and water they consume.

The data centre, which would require 150MW of electricity, would be built on land off Ipswich Road, opposite a Tesco superstore.

It would stand on a 32-acre (13-hectare) business park, for which permission has already been granted and work is under way, but a new application is needed for the data centre itself.

The site is in the River Yare valley, about 650m (700yds) away from Marston Marsh, a protected nature site.

The plans are causing concern locally and at a well-attended consultation event in Keswick this week, a group of protesters holding up placards stood outside to oppose the scheme.

Jan Hill, chairperson of Keswick Parish Council, wants to see more details when the application is lodged.

"The people who live here feel very passionate about keeping Keswick as it is and not sucking it into the rest of Norwich, which I fear is the way we may be going," she said.

Sue Gilbert, who said she lived in one of the oldest houses in the village, worries about the environmental impact the data centre could have on the Yare Valley.

"I get that we need to use AI but at what cost?" she said.

"This summer, temperatures have gone through the roof and we are still building these centres that use more energy than I'd care to even know about. How are they offsetting it?"

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James Harvey, a South Norfolk Green Party councillor who lives nearby, said the arguments for and against the data centre were "very nuanced".

"The direction of travel is that we are obviously going to need more data centres and more solar farms if we want to keep up with the rest of the world," he said.

"As someone who cares deeply about the environment, we need to make sure it is done right and in the right place, with renewable energy supplying it and the right water cooling systems and for it to have no adverse effect on the local area."

William Anthony, director of Norwich Apex, the firm that owns the land where the data centre would be built, told the BBC: "We can genuinely say people in Keswick will not be adversely affected by this."

He said the centre would be powered by green energy generated by wind farms off the north Norfolk coast, as part of the Norwich to Tilbury power network project.

"If we didn't build this, there would be a period of time before the line to Tilbury is completed where there would be no way of using the energy the offshore wind farm would produce," he said.

He assured people the facility would be different to large sites in the US, where people living nearby have complained about water supplies being affected and noise.

"This will be the most engineered building in Norfolk and will use a water circulation system in a closed loop, so once full, no new water would be consumed, aside from staff making cups of tea or washing up," he added.

"Our data centre will not generate more noise than existing background noise."

He said building the data centre would mean there would be less traffic than generated by the original business centre plans.

Data centres such as this would also be more efficient than previous facilities, he said.

A public consultation ends on Sunday and a planning application will be submitted in the coming weeks.

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