Our Story
A Scottish Clean Energy Developer
Our route to data centres began with clean energy.
ILI Group is first and foremost a Scottish, clean energy developer, with a twenty-year track record in delivering nationally significant renewable energy and energy storage projects across Scotland. Collectively these projects will save millions of tonnes of CO₂e, generate thousands of jobs, and deliver billions of pounds in investment across the Scottish economy.
We set out, twenty years ago, to make the most of Scotland’s clean energy potential with the aim of helping Scotland accelerate its progress towards its net-zero targets. Before committing to Cato, we tested a straightforward question: could a large data centre genuinely support Scotland’s energy transition, or would it work against it? The answer shaped everything that followed.
We concluded that, in the current context of Scotland’s grid, large demand projects could actually be a net-benefit to consumers and could better capture the renewable energy generated in Scotland so that it stays in Scotland.
On water we could see that the direction of travel for data centres was away from high water use, low water efficiency, towards a much higher standard where the water could be looped and re-used sustainably, without wider impacts on the water network. We found the best, most water efficient data centres in the industry and set that as the standard we would achieve here in Scotland.
We started out our journey in renewables, working with farming families across the country. We are proud that so many communities and farms now sustained by the income and wider community benefits from these earlier projects, including in Fife. In energy storage, we sought to resolve one of the major problems with renewable energy – that of intermittency. We brought forward the first Pumped Storage Hydro project in Scotland in nearly 50 years, a major infrastructure development of national significance that stands to rejuvenate large parts of the Highland economy, with benefits for the whole of Scotland. That is what we aim to achieve here with our Cato data centre project. Clean, green, infrastructure of a nationally significant scale that can deliver multiple economic benefits and that keeps us on track for net-zero.
