Šta se desilo

Alongside the Budget on 28 October 2026, HM Treasury published the Data Centre Covenant, a set of tests for data centres in the UK. As Stuart Stone reported for BusinessGreen, new data centres will face strict energy and nature tests, and the plan sparked fears over fossil fuel generation. The Chancellor said in the Budget speech that critical data centres would get the grid connections they need and, where necessary, be allowed to build onsite generation while they wait. The government estimates the UK needs 6 GW of AI data centre capacity by 2030.

The five tests, checked against the Covenant itself:

  • Lower electricity bills: pay their fair share of energy system costs so households and other businesses don't pick up the bill, and support grid flexibility and clean power.
  • Invest in local communities: strategic data centres agree a Local Benefit Plan with the local area, linked to the development's size.
  • The highest environmental standards: new facilities designed for a Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.3 or better, closed loop cooling to limit use of public water supplies, waste heat captured for nearby homes, schools, hospitals or businesses where there is a viable user, and annual reports from strategic data centres on energy and water use, efficiency, emissions, heat reuse and flexibility.
  • Jobs and supply chains: local jobs, paid apprenticeships, UK suppliers and British AI hardware.
  • Security: secure UK access to compute for the NHS and other public services, working with the National Cyber Security Centre.

All data centres are encouraged to meet the tests; strategic ones must meet them to qualify for help. That help comes from a new Ministerial Control Centre chaired by the Minister for AI, which can reserve and reallocate grid connections using Planning and Infrastructure Act powers and, only for exceptionally strategic projects that cannot get a connection in time, allow on-site generation under a "tightly controlled framework" until the grid connection arrives. The Covenant does not say which fuel that generation would use. The government will set out later how it defines a strategic data centre, and will consult on a draft Data Centre National Policy Statement.

Šta to znači za vašu firmu

Most businesses don't run a data centre, but almost all of them use one. Email, accounts software, file storage and websites all run in data centres. When you buy those services, the electricity behind them sits in your Scope 3, category 1, purchased goods and services. Most businesses estimate it from what they spend, which says nothing about how efficient or clean the provider is.

Published energy data makes better figures possible. If UK operators start publishing annual energy, water and emissions figures, as the Covenant asks of strategic sites and encourages for the rest, hosting and cloud providers will have more to give customers who ask for their share. It is encouragement, not a legal duty, and the details of who counts as strategic are still to come.

Efficiency matters as much as the grid. A data centre's overheads for cooling and power conversion are counted on top of what the servers use. The Covenant's target of 1.3 means 30 kWh of overhead for every 100 kWh of computing.

A worked example: the same servers in two buildings

Take an illustrative business that rents space for servers drawing an average of 10 kW, all year round. That is 87,600 kWh a year of computing.

  • In a facility built to the Covenant's PUE of 1.3, the building uses 113,880 kWh in all, which at the UK electricity factor of 0.13096 kg CO2e per kWh is 14.91 tonnes CO2e a year.
  • In an older facility running at a PUE of 1.6 (an illustrative figure), the same servers need 140,160 kWh, or 18.36 tonnes.
  • The difference is 3.44 tonnes CO2e a year for exactly the same computing.

Figures use the 2026 UK government factor for electricity generation. A provider running on another country's grid, or buying renewable electricity, would report a different figure; ask which method its number uses.

Šta uraditi sada

  1. List your hosting and cloud suppliers. Pull the year's spend on software subscriptions, hosting and cloud from your accounts. Our guide to IT, cloud and laptop emissions shows where each sits in your footprint.
  2. Ask your main providers for your share. Ask for the kWh and CO2e behind your account, the PUE of the sites you use, and whether figures are location-based or market-based. Our post on asking suppliers for carbon data has the wording.
  3. Keep the spend-based figure until you have a better one. Don't drop cloud from your footprint because the provider hasn't answered yet.
  4. If you run servers on site, count them. They are in your electricity bill already, so moving them to the cloud moves the emissions from Scope 2 to Scope 3 rather than removing them.