Tech and AI
Scottish planning authorities must tell Ministers about every data centre application above 50 megawatts within seven days of validating it
By Staff Writer | 20 August 2026
A direction issued on 17 August by Public Finance Minister Hannah Mary Goodlad requires councils to notify Scottish Ministers of data centre proposals exceeding 50 megawatts of power capacity. Ministers have separately recalled an appeal on a proposed green data centre in Edinburgh and issued directions requiring environmental impact assessment at sites in Fife and Edinburgh.
The duty is short and it is mechanical. Where a planning authority validates an application for a data centre development exceeding 50 megawatts of power capacity, it has seven days to tell Scottish Ministers. The instrument is The Town and Country Planning (Notification of Applications) (Data Centres exceeding 50MW Power Capacity) (Scotland) Direction 2026, and the Scottish Government describes its purpose as strategic monitoring of the pipeline of such applications and of what that pipeline means for wider infrastructure.
Power capacity is the trigger
The measure is not floor area, not capital value and not the number of jobs promised. It is the electrical load. That choice matters to anyone advising on one of these schemes, because it moves the first question from what the building looks like to what the connection agreement says.
Notification is not refusal, and it is not a call-in. It is the step that puts Ministers on notice while a local decision is still being taken, and it gives them the information on which a later decision to intervene could rest. The announcement says authorities must provide the application, the plans and the supporting documents, together with any environmental impact assessment or screening opinion.
It is essential to secure public benefits from this type of development, and I am clear that voices of communities that will be affected will be central to any considerations on data centres.
Hannah Mary Goodlad, Public Finance Minister, Scottish Government
Three decisions taken on the same day
The direction did not arrive on its own. The Minister recalled a planning appeal for ministerial decision relating to a proposed green data centre in Edinburgh, at Redheughs Avenue. Recalling an appeal means Ministers determine it rather than an appointed Reporter. A Reporter still considers the appeal and provides a report and a recommendation, but the final decision moves up.
Directions requiring environmental impact assessment were also issued at locations in Fife and Edinburgh, one of them the Wester Hermiston Data Centre Campus proposal. An assessment direction is a procedural step with practical teeth: it fixes the information the applicant has to produce before the application can be determined, and it usually fixes the timetable with it.
What it means for a promoter
Three things follow for anyone with a Scottish data centre in preparation. The first is that the 50 megawatt line has to be established early and defensibly, because the notification duty bites on validation and not on determination. The second is that the supporting documents which go to the council now go to Ministers as well, so the environmental material and the connection strategy are read by two audiences at once. The third is that an appeal is no longer a purely technical route to a decision by a Reporter, because recall is live and has just been used.
None of this changes the tests a planning authority applies. What it changes is who is watching while the authority applies them, and how early. For a sector whose applications have tended to be judged locally on noise, water, land take and community effect, the arrival of a national monitoring duty tied to electrical load is a change of register. The commercial consequence is simple enough: programme risk on a Scottish data centre now includes a step that no promoter controls.