Dr. James Carton:

It is clear that we need to do a couple of things in parallel. The first thing to do regarding data centres, given the number of them locating here, is to manage the situation. A fair share of data centres is not a bad idea. We have a good climate for data centres, at a consistent temperature across the seasons. We have to think socially in terms of the requirement for data centres and managing and deleting our data. There is concern about what is housed in data centres and the reason they exist. We have to manage that with so many connected devices coming on line over the next decade and beyond.

At the moment, we have a huge reliance on natural gas. At times, 60% or above of our electricity system and the majority of our heating system and industrial applications run on natural gas. That will be with us for the next decade but we need to set the foundations to move away from that. We cannot have that situation in 15 or 20 years' time. It is about moving the dial so we understand our reliance and move towards medium-term change. Those developments must occur now.

In the short term, there is no hydrogen available and no market. We see this with renewable offshore wind energy as well. The build-out of that will take a number of years to get the scale of offshore wind for our energy system. Hydrogen could come in parallel with that. The key is getting many things in parallel, managing our energy use and the location of energy loads on our system and building resilience and planning for offshore wind, electro-fuels and hydrogen to work hand in hand with our future energy system.