Gemma Brolly slams 'hypocrisy and energy madness' over Coleraine data centre plans

Aontú Deputy Leader and East Derry representative Gemma Brolly is sounding the alarm ahead of Wednesday's Land and Property and Strategic Assets Sub Committee meeting, launching a fierce challenge against the sale of publicly owned council land to facilitate the expansion for the controversial Coleraine campus data centre.

Brolly warned that Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council is sleepwalking into an environmental and infrastructural catastrophe, advancing high-impact industrial tech nodes while operating without the protections of an updated Local Development Plan Strategy, ignoring basic energy realities, and engaging in breath-taking climate hypocrisy.

Highlighting the profound insult this poses to local communities, Brolly drew a sharp, damning contrast between the heavy-handed carbon pressures being placed on local agriculture and the red carpet being rolled out for massive tech infrastructure.

"We are watching DAERA aggressively push mandatory carbon audits onto farmers, putting rural livelihoods under incredible strain in the name of our Climate Change Act targets", stated Brolly.

"Yet, in the very same breath, councillors are essentially being asked to rubber-stamp a land deal to facilitate the large scale expansion of a data centre campus which will swallow up hundreds of megawatts of power.

“It is a complete contradiction in terms and an absolute perversion of climate policy. You cannot penalise family farms out of existence over emissions while handing a blank cheque to an internationally owned industrial tech company that will blow our carbon budget to pieces."

Brolly sharply criticized the planning vacuum at the heart of this process, noting that the council area remains dangerously exposed without an updated robust Local Development Plan Strategy.

"Councillors will essentially be asked to rubber-stamp a land deal for the large scale expansion of an existing industrial data centre which will have very grave ramifications on the wider council area due to unexplained delays in bringing forward an updated Local Development Plan Strategy to protect our region's key landscape and environmental assets," she added.

"This land deal essentially entails land zoning of huge historical magnitude and wider implications, and cannot be made on the fly in a regulatory vacuum without full and transparent impact assessments and public consultation and scrutiny. It is an abdication of planning duties to residents, not to mention a total disregard for climate targets."

Emphasizing the staggering energy demands that will be required to facilitate the proposed data centre expansion, Brolly pointed to the mathematical impossibility of powering these facilities with local renewables.

"A single data centre, like that of the GreenScale Derry Campus, requires up to a staggering 400 megawatts of continuous power.

“In stark contrast, local renewable projects, such as the four wind turbines recently consented against the will of the local community despite 4,000 objections, on top of Benbradagh, a mountain of huge cultural significance and promoted by the Council as the Gateway to the Sperrins AONB, will generate only 13 to 19 megawatts.

“This means roughly 30 wind farms the size of the Benbradagh proposal, or 125 turbines each at a height of a 50 storey building, would be required to power just one data centre”.

In the absence of comprehensive, independent Environmental Impact Assessments being transparently presented to the public regarding cumulative landscape destruction, grid stability, or carbon budgets, Brolly is demanding an immediate halt to the proposed sale.

"We refuse to watch East Derry’s landscape and communities be sacrificed at the altar of speculative corporate tech infrastructure," she concluded.

"The Land and Property and Strategic Assets Sub-Committee must reject this land expansion. What is essentially permission for this project cannot be quietly pushed through; it must be escalated to the full council and subjected to rigorous, transparent environmental scrutiny with every required impact assessment completed."