WHEN an official from the UK’s grid operator appeared at Holyrood’s energy committee last week, he quietly revealed that Scotland may have more AI data centres on the books than previously understood.
Martyn Day, the SNP MSP for Linlithgow, had put it to Matt Magill, a director at the National Energy System Operator (NESO), that there were "around 20 AI data centres in the pipeline".
Magill corrected him.
"There are closer to 30 in Scotland at the moment," he said. "It is about 9.7 gigawatts (GW)."
This sparked a question: where and what are these extra potential data centres?
Around two dozen projects have so far been identified through planning documents and public announcements by Action to Protect Rural Scotland, with analysis by the countryside charity putting the potential electricity demand of the known projects at around 7.3GW.
But that leaves an apparent gap between the data centres Scotland can see and the larger figure given by the organisation responsible for managing Britain's electricity system.
Something else Magill told MSPs offered a clue as to why.
Apparently, some of the data centres known to NESO have connection dates stretching into the late 2030s – and therefore may not have to demonstrate that they have planning permission for years.
"There are a lot of timing issues, but it will not be in the next few years that those developers will have to submit planning to us to prove that they have permission," Magill said.
Some, of course, may never get that far. Changes to Britain's grid connections system would probably remove some of the more speculative applications "currently on the books", he acknowledged.
But developers do not have to wait for a full planning application before technically seeking access to the electricity network.
It means prospective data centres can enter the connections process – tied to particular locations in Scotland and seeking potentially hundreds of megawatts of electricity – before their proposals even appear on a council planning portal.
And there is currently no public register where communities, councils or journalists can look them up.
The register that doesn't exist
DEVELOPERS seeking to generate electricity and connect to Britain's transmission network – for example, wind farms – are recorded on NESO's publicly accessible Transmission Entry Capacity, or TEC, Register.
Updated twice a week, it provides a remarkable level of detail.
The public can search projects by name, developer and connection site, see how much capacity they have contracted, and even where a project is when it comes to its planning and development cycle.
A project listed as "Scoping", for example, is one for which NESO is not aware of a planning application having been made. "Awaiting Consents" means an application is known to have been submitted, while "Consents Approved" means permission is understood to have been granted.
But there is no equivalent public register for the other side of the electricity system – those seeking to actually consume electricity.
This was confirmed in a Freedom of Information request asking NESO for information about data centre projects in December 2025.
In the response, NESO said they “do not currently have a register of demand connections”. The grid operator added that they are “considering this as a development piece”.
It went on: “But it would take considerable time to produce. The data is held in various data sources including contracts, and would need to be extracted from these sources, reviewed and consolidated. To determine whether any demand projects are data centres would involve manually checking these various data sources.”
This means that a company looking to build a wind farm, for example, and put hundreds of megawatts into the transmission network can be publicly identified before it has submitted a planning application.
But a company seeking to build an enormous data centre and take hundreds of megawatts out of the system? Not necessarily.
Dr Callum MacIver, an energy systems expert at the University of Strathclyde, told the Sunday National that the lack of an equivalent demand register partly reflected the way Britain's system had historically operated.
"The system has been set up to service demand," he told the Sunday National.
Homes, offices and factories needed electricity. The job of the system was, largely, to work out how to supply it.
"[But] we're in a new era where substantially large and numerous demand centres are looking to add to the system," Dr MacIver said.
Ofgem, the energy regulator, said in July that around 73GW of data-centre demand was sitting in Britain's connections pipeline, spread across roughly 315 projects.
Dr MacIver said there was a “straight answer” when asked whether there should now be greater public visibility of demand connection applications: yes.
“I think for everyone concerned, greater transparency would be helpful."
He added that the scale of proposed data-centre development meant it increasingly felt like something that “should be strategically sort of planned”.
The Sunday National contacted NESO to clarify the (around 30) figure mentioned by Magill, with the system operator then acknowledging that the number given to the committee was not correct.
It said there are, in fact, 28 transmission-connected data-centre applications in Scotland, representing around 8.864GW of potential electricity demand – more than 800MW less than the figure given to MSPs.
The Sunday National understands that NESO will update the Holyrood committee accordingly.
But the revised figure still leaves a sizeable discrepancy between what is visible publicly and what is known to the grid system.
NESO – when asked – did not provide any further details (location, developer etc) for those data centres.
The Sunday National understands that this is because connection applications can contain commercially sensitive customer information.
The grid operator also stressed that applications in the connections pipeline “should not be read as confirmed future electricity consumption”.
“Not every project will connect, projects must meet milestones, and projects cannot connect before the necessary network reinforcements are in place,” they added.
“NESO has a clear view of transmission-connected data-centre demand across Great Britain, including around 8.864GW of potential data-centre demand in Scotland, and holds the information needed to operate the electricity system securely today and plan for future demand.”
The spokesperson added: “We continue to work with Government, Ofgem, network operators and customers to reform the connections process and provide the right information to support strategic planning and transparency.”
Kat Jones, the director of APRS, called for more transparency and a definitive public list of potential Scottish data centres.
“Communities deserve transparency over the plans for hyperscale AI data centres in Scotland – at the moment, the only list that exists is the one we have created from information in the planning portals, but NESO evidently has information about many more,” she said.
“We have been asking the Scottish Government to make and update a definitive public list since we started this campaign – simply requiring local authorities to report once a planning application is submitted is nowhere near enough advance notice to look at the impacts coming down the line for Scotland.”
Jones added: “Why do NESO have to keep an updated public register of all generation and storage connections which is updated twice weekly and yet they are floundering around for the figures for data centre demand? It is almost as if NESO doesn't actually know how many data centres are in the grid queue.”
She went on: “Their lack of oversight on this would explain why the Scottish grid queue for data centres has been allowed to rise to more than twice our winter peak demand, a completely laughable level.
“It certainly doesn't fill me with confidence that they know what they are doing. And the Scottish Government should be seriously worried and asking a lot of difficult questions of NESO and the UK Government.”
