Professor Barry McMullin:

Combining all fossil fuel infrastructure with data centres may be slightly blunt. As I said, there may be arguments for deploying more gas-fired generation capacity on a temporary basis. However, in respect of data centres, large energy users and infrastructure to support the expansion of total energy use - not the migration of energy use from heating and transport into electricity because that is a different question - pending having our carbon budget programme and a climate action plan that reflects that programme, which will be next year at the earliest, it would not be prudent to continue expanding our electricity demand with further large users such as data centres.