Summary
- A proposed 40MW data centre at Viridor’s Avonmouth site has attracted a fresh wave of public objections.
- Viridor and Rivington Energy intend to supply the facility directly from the neighbouring energy-from-waste operation.
- The application seeks to convert an existing polymers recycling facility and remains undecided.
A proposed 40MW data centre at Avonmouth in Bristol has attracted a fresh wave of objections while its planning application remains under consideration.
The project is being developed through a partnership between Viridor Energy and Rivington Energy and would reuse Viridor’s existing polymers recycling facility on Severn Road as a data centre, with external plant, generating equipment, access works, landscaping, and other supporting infrastructure.
The application, reference 26/12083/F, was submitted in June and remains undecided. Local reporting says dozens of objections have been lodged in recent days, raising concerns including environmental impact, resource consumption, and the wider case for expanding AI infrastructure.
The site is unusual because its power strategy is based on direct supply from Viridor’s neighbouring energy-from-waste operation rather than relying solely on a new large grid connection. Viridor and Rivington say the model can provide long-term electricity generated from residual waste while avoiding some of the grid-access constraints facing other UK data centre schemes.
The companies announced their broader partnership in June, with plans to examine as much as 200MW of data centre capacity across four Viridor energy-from-waste locations. Avonmouth is the first proposed project and could provide 40MW if planning and construction progress as intended.
Viridor has said the Avonmouth facility could become operational from 2027, subject to approval. The project is therefore not simply a speculative land proposal: an existing industrial building has been identified, an energy source sits alongside it, and a detailed change-of-use application is already in the planning system.
Behind-the-meter power meets local scrutiny
Directly coupling generation with a data centre addresses one of the largest constraints in the UK market. Large new grid connections can take years to secure, particularly in regions where transmission and distribution networks already face competing requests from industrial electrification, renewable generation, storage, housing, and other infrastructure.
Locating compute beside generation can reduce dependence on a conventional import arrangement, although it does not remove the need to engineer resilience. Data centres require continuous power, so the project must still address what happens when the energy-from-waste plant is offline for planned maintenance or suffers an unplanned outage.
The planning documents include external plant and generating equipment, indicating that the facility will require its own supporting power systems. Detailed resilience architecture, including the role of grid import, backup generation, and UPS systems, will determine how the proposed direct-energy model works under fault and maintenance conditions.
Environmental objections are also likely to focus on cooling and noise as the application progresses. The effect of a 40MW data centre depends heavily on how heat is rejected, the operating hours and acoustic performance of fans and generators, water consumption, and the relationship between the industrial site and surrounding habitats.
Avonmouth is already a heavily industrialised area, which changes the planning context compared with a greenfield or residential-edge development. Reusing an existing polymers facility can reduce new land take, while proximity to an operating energy plant provides an infrastructure advantage that would be difficult to reproduce elsewhere.
It does not remove the need for scrutiny. Data centres can operate continuously for decades, so planning decisions have to account for their long-term electricity, cooling, noise, transport, and maintenance profile rather than considering only the construction phase.
The project also sits inside a wider UK push to build domestic AI and cloud infrastructure. Rivington has argued that access to competitively priced power remains a disadvantage for UK projects compared with some European markets, making colocated generation central to its development model with Viridor.
The Avonmouth application will provide an early test of that approach. If approved, it could demonstrate a route for converting existing industrial sites beside dependable generation into data centre capacity. If the environmental and community objections prove difficult to resolve, it will also show that access to power does not by itself remove the planning constraints facing new UK digital infrastructure.
