Common Questions
"I’ve heard there has been no assessment of the environmental impacts. No body knows what the effects will be."
The Planning Application does contain a comprehensive assessment of environmental impacts
The Planning Permission in Principle application is supported by detailed environmental studies into the impacts of noise, air quality, water, landscape, and ecology. These assessments have been carried out by independent specialists and are available to view on the Fife Council planning portal or this website.
These will be assessed by a mixture of internal specialist consultees within Fife Council (such as their Roads and Transportation Department, and Environmental Health), and external statutory consultees such as the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, Nature Scot, and Scottish Water. Their specialists will each assess the proposals independently of the design team, and all consultee responses will be published openly.
"I understand that this project will use massive amounts of energy. Surely, that can’t be a good thing, can it?"
In the context of Scotland's energy system, large, well-located demand is part of the solution — not a problem to be managed.
The bigger picture matters here. UK and Scottish Net Zero plans assume total electricity demand will more than double in the coming years as transport, heating, and industry move away from fossil fuels. Society is moving away from coal and gas, and that involves a massive electrification of all of these sectors. Locating large, stable demand in Scotland, close to where most renewable generation is located, makes the whole system work more efficiently. It reduces curtailment costs (the payments wind farms receive to switch off when the grid is full), gets better use out of existing grid investment, and helps keep system costs (and household bills) lower than they would otherwise be. Cato is exactly the kind of demand the energy transition needs.
"I have been told that Cato will guzzle unsustainable amounts of water."
Cato is specifically designed for low water use. Less than you might imagine.
We recognised that the direction of travel for data centres was away from high water use / low water efficiency, to a much higher standard where the water could be looped sustainably without creating a burden on the wider area. We found the best, most water efficient data centres in the industry and set that as the standard we would achieve.
Cooling is what drives water use at most data centres, and Cato has been designed to keep water use low, using highly efficient cooling systems, supported by the cool Scottish climate, which allows a high share of the year’s cooling to come from outside air alone. Rainwater harvesting and process water reuse are designed in.
On average, in the course of one year, Cato is expected to use about as much mains water as a few hundred average homes. Cato will not take water from the same pipe network that supplies the neighbouring village of Auchtertool. Scottish Water were consulted before the planning application was submitted and confirmed that there was already sufficient capacity on their existing network for Cato’s proposed water usage. The ExxonMobil plant at Mossmorran (a significant water user on the same system) has since closed, adding further headroom.
"This looks like it would tower over the town and dominate the landscape."
While the Cato development is large, its visibility varies considerably depending on where it is viewed from.
The natural topography of the site and surrounding hilly landscape provides screening from many surrounding locations, including much of Auchtertool. Indeed, it is possible to stand within the planning application boundary of the site and not see the buildings, because of that natural topography screening. Had the project been a few hundred metres to the north or south, then the impacts might have been different, but it has been designed such that this is not the case, with building heights varying and stepping up across the site so that it is screened (as much as possible) from key viewpoints.
The project is not invisible. Our planning application includes close-up views from higher ground where it is highly visible, but for most of the surrounding areas the impact is not as large as the site plan layout viewed in isolation would imply.
"Won’t the Auchtertool Linn Wildlife site be lost?"
The Auchtertool Linn, as with the majority of the site, will remain undeveloped, and indeed will be enhanced by the proposals. A net bio-diversity gain will be achieved.
Our proposal includes new woodland, new wetland, and wildflower meadow, which are themselves a vast improvement upon the actively ploughed and farmed land in terms of bio-diversity value.
"Videos on-line suggest noise from data centres is constant and unbearable."
Cato is designed to minimise noise impacts.
Older data centres elsewhere around the world, and particularly those in hotter climates, traditionally used air room cooling to cool their servers. These fans are noisy.
The direction of travel though is away from this source of cooling, towards highly efficient liquid cooling systems that do away with much of the mechanical air-cooling requirement.
A detailed noise assessment forms part of the planning application and is on the Fife Council planning portal. Statutory noise limits will be met at the nearest sensitive receptors, and that the design has been developed to avoid noise nuisance to neighbours.
"Will generators be running all the time?"
No. Generators are a back up power source, a standard requirement for any data centre in the same way that hospitals, telecoms exchanges and large commercial buildings all have them. Their purpose is to keep the site running safely during a grid outage. They are not a primary source of power.
As Cato is at the Planning Permission in Principle stage, the detailed engineering design is still being finalised. That means the specific details, the generator specifications, the emissions controls, the testing hours and the maximum permitted running hours have not yet been set in stone.
What we can say now is that, as a green energy company, we will not be using diesel or other carbon-rich fuels. As technology continues to evolve, the sector is increasingly adopting zero-carbon alternatives to traditional diesel generation, and we will continue to prioritise best available technologies throughout the design process.
"Who will use the data centre?"
The site is being built as a high-performance computing facility for one or a small number of major operators, capable of hosting AI training and inference workloads alongside conventional cloud and enterprise workloads. Who those operators are is subject to commercial confidentiality at this stage – operators do not sign long-term capacity agreements until planning consent is in place. The identity of any operator taking capacity at Cato will be disclosed publicly ahead of the site becoming operational.
The more important point is that the commitments on this site do not depend on the tenant. The renewable electricity, the water limits, the biodiversity net gain, the community benefit fund and the heat or home-energy fund are all secured through legal agreement with the project. . They travel with the site, not with the operator. Whoever runs Cato inherits those obligations.
Any operator will make a substantial contribution to the local and national economy by nature of the site being physically located in Fife. This includes £29 million a year in non-domestic rates, directly paid into the Scottish Rates system, Employer National Insurance and PAYE on around 120 permanent on-site jobs, at average salaries of over £50,000
The independent BiGGAR Economics analysis puts the total tax generated by Cato at close to £500 million over a typical 15-year operational period.
"Will Cato really run on renewable energy?"
A grid connection on its own doesn’t mean every unit of electricity is renewable at the moment it’s used. When we say Cato will run on 100% renewable electricity, we mean its consumption will be matched by renewable generation secured through long-term power purchase agreements and direct connections to nearby renewable energy and storage projects.
No grid-connected user anywhere can honestly say every electron comes straight from a wind turbine at every second of the day. What we can say is that our approach goes well beyond relying on the average grid mix. We procure genuinely additional renewable energy, and we do it in a country that already produces more clean power than its grid can use, much of it currently wasted. Cato puts that clean power to work, close to where it is generated.
"Why do you call it a green data centre?"
For ILI Group, a green data centre is judged against five principles: it should be powered by renewable energy, use natural resources responsibly, contribute positively to its surroundings, deliver measurable benefits for local communities, and operate openly and transparently throughout its lifetime.
In practice, that means renewable-matched electricity backed by long-term renewable procurement, low water use by design, opportunities to reuse surplus heat, measurable biodiversity enhancement, and a community benefit fund developed with local communities.
We are not claiming Cato has no environmental footprint. All large infrastructure does. What we are claiming is that Cato’s footprint is smaller than a conventional data centre of comparable capacity, that it is located where it reduces waste rather than adds to it, and that its environmental commitments are secured through the planning agreement rather than left as intent. If any of the five principles above change, the description “green” changes with them.