Bristol's Avonmouth Data Centre, and your "F-me, Doris!" moment for today. EXCLUSIVE!
Nobody's asked where an Avonmouth data centre's cooling water comes from. Yet. The Severn Estuary is closer than any house. Don't you think?
Right people. For those who don’t know. A “F-me, Doris” moment is old newsroom jargon for a story so striking it makes the sub-editor blurt that out reading it — strong enough for a splash or a front-page lead. Today’s my day for such an ‘Exclusive.
So. Let’s start with a number. Seven hundred metres. That’s the number that earns it.
Unremarkably. That’s also the distance between a proposed AI data centre on Severn Road, Avonmouth, and one of the most protected stretches of water in Europe. Like. Who knew, up until now?
The Severn Estuary. A Special Area of Conservation, a Special Protection Area, and a Ramsar wetland of international importance — all three, stacked on top of each other like a planning officer’s fever dream.
Seven hundred metres is closer than any house. Keep that number somewhere handy. You’ll want it again before the end.
Now, the nearest home sits the best part of two kilometres away, tucked safely behind commercial sheds and industrial yards. Avonmouth itself — the whole suburb, per the last census, has a population of 3,402.
Conversely, the nearby wetland has no such luxury. It’s just there, doing what estuaries do, while Bristol City Council decides whether to wave through a 40MW facility backed by 32 standby generators next door.
Nobody has been required to say where the water’s coming from. Not the operator. Not Bristol City Council. Not the Environment Agency. Not even the legendary John Kettley is a weatherman. And he knows a lot about water. Albeit from above.
So there was nothing else for it. The Almighty Gob went looking for the answer, the way it always does — one document at a time, no press pass required. What it found instead was a gap.
And. The gap, as it happens. Turns out to be the story.
The Site Itself.
The application — case reference 26/12083/F, Avonmouth, Bristol, BS11 — proposes converting the former Viridor Polymers Recycling Facility into an AI data centre, according to the application’s own Crime Impact Statement. The applicant’s full legal name, confirmed by the Environment Agency’s own permit filing, is Avonmouth Data Centre Limited — the entity behind both the planning application and a separate environmental permit application, reference EPR/ZP3925MP/A001.
Forty megawatts of capacity. High-density racks up to 144kW. Operational by 2027, if approved by Bristol City Council’s planning committee.
You’ll notice something as you read on. Every figure in this piece comes from a document somebody was legally obliged to publish.
None of it was leaked. None of it was hidden particularly well. It was simply written in the kind of language designed to be filed, not read. And. No back of fag packet required.
It’s the first of up to 200MW planned across four UK sites, each one bolted onto an existing Viridor energy-from-waste plant. The pitch is elegant: burn the bins, skip the grid queue, power the servers.
Rivington Energy gets to call it green. The Almighty Gob calls it a fuel cell with better PR.
The site’s own Environmental Risk Assessment, submitted by Avonmouth Data Centre Limited under permit reference EPR/ZP3925MP/A001, reveals a genuinely larger backup operation than the press releases suggest. Thirty-two standby generators, each rated at 2.424 megawatts of electrical output, with a combined thermal input of 233.28MWth to run them.
That’s roughly 78MW of emergency generating capacity sitting behind a 40MW facility — nearly double what the site is meant to draw day to day, purely for the days it doesn’t.
Neither figure appears in the marketing copy. Yet. Both appear in paragraph after paragraph of an engineering document nobody outside a planning consultancy was ever expected to read.
What Forty Megawatts Actually Means.
Nobody pictures a megawatt. Do they? Well. At least I don’t. Anyway. For the benefit of those just like me. Here’s what one looks like, worked from Ofgem’s own 2026 figures, not guesswork.
Forty megawatts, running flat out — which is how data centres operate, by design — is roughly 13,000 kettles boiling at exactly the same moment. Or 800 rapid EV chargers running simultaneously.
Over a year, that’s enough electricity for about 140,000 homes. Bristol’s population is around 495,000, which works out to roughly 206,000 households using the national average household size — a calculated estimate, not an official count. Even on that estimate, it’s getting on for seven homes in every ten in the entire city.
Or turn it into money. Take a household spending £200 a month on electricity — a non-representative example, for illustrative purposes only, not an official average. That works out to roughly 9,200 kWh a year. This site, running for a single day, uses roughly 960,000 kWh.
One day’s output from Avonmouth would cover that household’s electricity bill for more than a hundred years.
Then there’s the people who don’t have a choice about their power supply.
A home oxygen concentrator — the machine that keeps someone with COPD breathing, running 24 hours a day — uses around 3,500 kWh a year. This site’s annual output would run 100,000 of them, non-stop, for a year.
A home dialysis machine, doing its full daily cycle, comes to roughly 1,300 kWh a year. That’s 267,000 machines, for a year.
CPAP machines, keeping people with sleep apnoea breathing through the night — close to two million of them, for a year.
Even something as ordinary as a mobility scooter, charged every day for a year, comes to about 153 kWh. Avonmouth’s output would charge 2.3 million of them.
None of this is the electricity those people will actually get. It’s what the site could power, if it were pointed at them instead of a server rack. It isn’t. That’s the point.
What About the Actual Warming?
Here’s the bit the “green” pitch skates past. This site would draw its power from an energy-from-waste plant, and energy-from-waste is not the clean alternative the industry likes to suggest.
Analysis by openDemocracy and the UK Without Incineration Network found the average UK incinerator produces more than twice as much CO2 per unit of electricity as a gas-fired power station. Some incinerators are worse than coal.
Incinerators also sit outside the UK’s Emissions Trading Scheme, so operators pay nothing for the carbon they release — a gap that only closes from 2028. Roughly a tonne of CO2 goes up for every tonne of waste burned, about half of it from fossil sources like plastic.
That’s the power source behind “Rivington Energy gets to call it green.” The Almighty Gob still calls it a fuel cell with better PR — now with the numbers to back it up.
The site’s own Environmental Risk Assessment rates the global warming impact of its diesel backup generators as “Medium risk of harm to Environment, Harm to Human Health” — the only category in the entire document the operator doesn’t rate as low or insignificant.
Zoom out, and the national picture is worse than most people realise. The UK government’s own official estimate for AI compute emissions over 2025 to 2035 was recently revised upward — from 0.142 million tonnes of CO2 to a range of 34 to 123 million tonnes. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the government admitting its own model was wrong by more than a hundredfold.
Independent analysis by Carbon Brief goes further still. If UK data centre expansion reaches its likely scale and leans on gas power to do it, annual emissions could hit 70 million tonnes of CO2 — roughly Sweden’s entire yearly total, or the equivalent of 11.4 million UK homes. About a third of every household in the country.
Closer to Avonmouth’s own scale: a report by Global Action Plan and Foxglove found that just ten of the UK’s largest proposed data centres, using the developers’ own figures, add up to 2.75 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year — roughly matching the entire annual carbon saving the UK public achieved by switching to electric vehicles in 2025.
Ten sites. One year’s national progress on emissions, cancelled out.
Bristol’s own contribution to that total, added to the rest of the country’s, isn’t something anyone’s calculated. Not for this site. Not for Bristol’s data centres as a whole. The honest answer to “what’s Avonmouth’s carbon footprint” is the same answer that’s run through this entire piece: nobody’s required to say, so as of now, nobody has.
What the Document Measures, and What It Doesn’t.
Here is where the sleight of hand happens, and it isn’t even a clever one.
The Environmental Risk Assessment concludes there’s no significant risk to human health. It reaches that conclusion by measuring distance to the nearest home — over 500 metres, comfortably clear.
It does not measure distance to the nearest habitat. The Severn Estuary — SAC, SPA, Ramsar, three international designations for one body of water — sits 700 metres away. Closer than the houses the risk assessment is so pleased with itself about.
It gets folded into a generic “ecological receptor” category, filed somewhere between a hedge and a car park.
Twenty miles up the same estuary sits Slimbridge — the wetland reserve Sir Peter Scott founded in 1946, home to the world’s largest collection of wild swans, geese and ducks, and the birthplace of the entire Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT). It sits, appropriately enough, within the same Severn Estuary Ramsar site the Environment Agency’s own risk assessment treats as an afterthought.
It isn’t a separate concern from Avonmouth. It’s downstream of the same tidal system, part of the same wintering ground for the same migratory birds, protected under the same set of designations.
Bristol knows Slimbridge. Bristol has taken the kids to feed the geese there over the years. Nobody’s told them it shares a postcode’s worth of estuary with a standby generator farm nearly twice the size of the facility it’s meant to back up.
Bristol City Council already knows this matters, on paper. It runs a biodiversity offsetting scheme, funded through Section 106 developer contributions, built specifically because a 2010/11 study found that Avonmouth development risks a cumulative “in-combination” effect on the wading birds and wildfowl of the Severn Estuary — the same protected population Slimbridge exists to support.
Mitigation has been focused on Hallen Marsh, a few minutes up the road from Severn Road. The council is legally obliged, as the “competent authority” under the Habitats Regulations, to screen any qualifying development for exactly this risk before approval — with Natural England, the government’s own statutory adviser on nature conservation, as the body it’s required to consult.
Search for that screening against this specific application, and you find nothing. No published Habitats Regulations Assessment. No Biodiversity Net Gain metric. No s106 contribution tied to the case reference.
That doesn’t prove it hasn’t happened somewhere in a filing cabinet. It proves the same thing the water question proved: whatever’s been done, it hasn’t been made easy to find, on a site the council’s own framework says should require it.
The document does confirm one thing clearly, though. The only water-related activity it discloses is surface runoff — rainwater and compound drainage, running through oil interceptors into the existing Viridor drainage system and out to the Bristol Channel.
Cooling water — how much, drawn from where, whether it’s the River Avon, the mains, or somewhere nobody’s named yet — does not appear. Not because it was assessed and found acceptable. Because nobody asked.
Notice the pattern forming. It’ll come back.
The People Who Actually Work There.
Every figure in that risk assessment is measured against one kind of person: someone who lives nearby. It’s the same trick the water question and the wetland question both ran on — measure against the wrong thing, and the right thing never gets asked about at all.
Nobody’s measured against the people who work there.
Avonmouth and Severnside together form one of the UK’s most significant industrial zones — 1,800 hectares, five miles of estuary frontage, well over 10,000 jobs in distribution alone, with thousands more across energy, waste, engineering and logistics. This is a working population in the thousands, much of it outdoors or in warehouse buildings with minimal sound insulation, sitting far closer to Severn Road than any resident ever will.
Seabank Power Station sits roughly 90 metres away. The neighbouring vehicle auction yards, IAA UK Auctions and Copart, sit close enough that their staff work within sight of the site all day, every working day. None of them are 1.8km away. None of them were ever going to be.
And here’s the part that actually matters: nobody assesses them either.
The Environmental Risk Assessment measures noise and air quality against residential receptors, because that’s what environmental permits are built to protect. Separately, UK workplace noise law — the Control of Noise at Work Regulations 2005, enforced by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) — places the duty on your own employer to control noise generated on your own site.
Neither one covers what crosses a boundary from someone else’s operation onto a workforce that isn’t theirs to protect.
Put plainly: a worker who would stand metres from a data centre’s cooling plant for an eight-hour shift, five days a week, wouldn’t be covered by the residential assessment, because they don’t live there. They wouldn’t be covered by workplace noise law either, because the noise wouldn’t be coming from their own employer’s site.
Captured, in one. They fall cleanly through the gap between two systems that were each built to catch something else. Like. Who knew, again.
Nobody had to lie to leave them out. Nobody had to try. The two forms that exist simply weren’t designed with them in mind, and nobody’s written a third one.
The Gap Isn’t Local. It’s National.
This is the part that turns an Avonmouth planning story into a Gob story, and it comes straight from Parliament’s own paperwork, not from anywhere anonymous.
Written evidence submitted to Parliament confirms that the Environment Agency’s National Framework for Water Resources — the document that decides whether new reservoirs get built — excludes data centres from its demand forecasts.
This is happening at the same time the government has designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure, and fielded over 200 local authority applications for AI Growth Zones.
So. Let’s translate that out of committee-room language. Shall we? The country is fast-tracking a category of building that can use, by Thames Water’s own evidence, between 4 and 19 million litres of water a day — equivalent to roughly 50,000 households.
And the model used to plan future water supply has formally decided not to count it.
That isn’t a local oversight at Avonmouth. It’s a structural hole, and Avonmouth just happens to be where you can see daylight through it. There’s that same pattern again. Remember?
What This Means For Your Water Bill.
This isn’t a fringe concern any more. In July 2026, Water UK — the trade body for every water company in England, including Bristol Water — told Parliament directly:
“Unforgivable” — a “genuine failing of government.”
Their own figures: data centres in England currently draw around 6.6 million litres of drinking water a day. The government wants to triple UK data centre capacity by 2030. If it does, that rises to roughly 19.8 million litres a day — equivalent to 60,000 homes.
Some individual sites are already asking for up to 3 million litres a day each, on their own. Avonmouth has disclosed none.
Bristol Water’s own recent history makes the stakes local rather than abstract. The company first proposed a second reservoir at Cheddar back in 2013. It dropped the plan in 2018 after Ofwat, the water industry regulator, raised serious doubts it was in customers’ interests.
That scheme has now been resurrected, with £84 million earmarked and work due to start by 2029 — a reservoir Bristol Water itself once judged too uncertain to justify, before a single litre of data centre demand was counted anywhere in the planning.
Bristol Water customers are already facing bill rises in 2026 to fund network upgrades. None of those figures include what Avonmouth, or the three further sites planned after it, might add. Nobody’s required to say, so nobody has.
Jobs, Rates, and the Sound of a Number Not Being Given.
So, let’s ask what Bristol gets in return, and the paperwork goes soft — like bathroom tissue, and just as useless when wet.
The application’s own Crime Impact Statement offers only that the scheme brings “high-value employment and infrastructure use” — no number attached, because data centres are notoriously light on staff for their size. A £10 billion, ten-facility campus at Blyth is expected to create 400 jobs, total, across the entire site.
Locally. Business rates are the genuine prize. Bristol City Council — as a Business Rates Retention Pilot Authority — keeps more of that revenue than most councils do.
Comparable sites are paying rates bills running into the millions annually. There’s now a live Westminster proposal to let councils keep 100% of new data centre rates permanently — precisely because nobody trusts the current split to buy enough local goodwill.
None of that figure exists yet for Avonmouth either. It won’t, formally, until the Valuation Office Agency assesses the finished building.
Which means the two numbers residents would actually need — jobs, and rates — to judge whether “economic benefit” is true or décor are both currently unknowable. Convenient, that. Don’t you think?
Where Avonmouth Sits on the Map.
Of course. To the likes of you and me, forty megawatts sounds abstract until you put it next to the rest of the country.
So. Slough’s Thames Valley cluster alone runs to roughly a gigawatt combined. Avonmouth is about four per cent of that, from a single site. The Blyth campus in Northumberland is being built out to 10 data centres and £10 billion of investment. Avonmouth is one shed, one waste plant, and one 40MW connection.
That’s worth holding onto, because it cuts both ways. It means Avonmouth isn’t about to replicate the infrasound horror stories coming out of Virginia’s hyperscale campuses — this is a modest facility by national standards, not a monster.
It also raises the question nobody in the application has answered: why does a 40MW site need close to 78MW of backup sitting behind it, nearly double its own declared load? Standby capacity that size isn’t unusual for a data centre chasing uptime guarantees. But it’s another number the marketing never mentions, and another reason “modest” shouldn’t be mistaken for “nothing to check.”
Bristol, in other words, isn’t becoming the next Slough. Not yet. It’s becoming something smaller and, in its own way, more interesting: the first of four planned Viridor-Rivington sites, a trial run for a formula the same partnership wants to repeat in Greater London, Oxfordshire, and Fife.
So, basically. Whatever gets waved through on Severn Road becomes the template. That’s worth knowing before the committee votes, not after. Wouldn’t you say?
Elsewhere, This Has Already Happened.
Oh, and by the way, none of this is speculation dressed up as journalism. It’s already on the record, in other places, where the same disclosure gap went unchallenged for long enough to show up in the water and on the land.
Mansfield, Georgia — a 50-acre Meta data centre pushed local water use up by 200 million gallons a year, and nearby residents were left with contaminated wells and collapsing water pressure.
Morgan County, Georgia — residents say their drinking water turned undrinkable after a Meta campus began operating; the case reached the US Congress, where a member of the House held up jars of brown well water during a hearing.
Cheyenne, Wyoming — city utilities confirmed a data centre contractor as the source of a bacterial contamination that took months to clear from the local reclaimed water system.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa — state officials discovered 40 unpermitted wells at a single data centre operator’s site, sunk without the paperwork that was supposed to make them visible.
On wildlife directly — the transmission infrastructure built to feed data centres has been shown to fragment habitat and disrupt migratory routes; greater sage grouse have been documented actively avoiding land near new power lines, shrinking their usable range even where not a single tree was felled.
On watershed scale — close to 100 data centres now sit inside the Atlanta region’s watershed alone, and water-use disclosure remains voluntary, inconsistent, and — sound familiar — largely absent.
Every one of those started exactly where Avonmouth is now. A planning application. A risk assessment measuring the wrong distance. A water question nobody was made to answer before the concrete went in.
The difference, so far, is that nobody’s found the brown well water in Avonmouth yet. That’s not reassurance. That’s a timeline.
The Same Story, Closer to Home.
You don’t need to go to Georgia either. West London will do.
Residents of the Wesley Estate in Park Royal, Ealing, protested this July against a twelfth data centre planned within a kilometre of their homes. Eleven were already there.
Pam Hughes, 83, said she recorded a temperature of 39°C inside her own home during last month’s heatwave. She’s lived there for years. She’s never needed to measure her living room like a server rack before.
Estella O’Brien, 67, lives close enough that the next facility, once built, will stand five metres from her front door.
“Every single member of the estate is against it. Everyone I’ve spoken to.”
Campaigners point to Ealing Council’s own 2024 air quality report, which found nitrogen dioxide readings in the area already exceeding World Health Organisation guidelines — before the twelfth data centre goes up, not after.
Their core complaint isn’t really about any single facility. It’s that the air quality monitoring network doesn’t run continuously across the whole cluster, so short-term pollution spikes go unmeasured.
Avonmouth is one site, not twelve. Bristol isn’t Park Royal, not yet. However, the pattern that got Park Royal to eleven data centres in a kilometre started exactly the same way Avonmouth has: one application at a time, each one individually “not significant,” never assessed as a whole.
The Power Question, Answered Honestly.
Bear in mind, The Almighty Gob doesn’t manufacture villains where the facts don’t support one. In fairness, Bristol’s grid is genuinely constrained. The Avonmouth and Severnside corridor is named, specifically, as an area where competing demand is already causing delays — the same pattern that’s stalled housing connections in parts of London.
The scale of that squeeze, nationally, is worth sitting with. Ofgem’s own figures show data centre projects currently in the UK grid connection queue amount to roughly 73 gigawatts of demand. Britain’s entire peak electricity demand, the most the whole country has ever drawn at once, is about 45 gigawatts.
Which means, of course. Data centres alone are asking for more power than the country has ever used. Go figure.
Avonmouth. However, is largely built to dodge that exact bottleneck, drawing power directly from the adjacent waste plant rather than the shared network.
It’s the one part of this story that isn’t a scandal. Everything else nearby still queues behind it.
The Road Nobody’s Measured.
Oops. I almost forgot. There’s one more document missing, and it’s the kind that usually gets asked for automatically: a Transport Assessment, or a Construction Traffic Management Plan.
The Crime Impact Statement’s own document register — the full list of what was submitted alongside it — names three drawings. A site plan, a proposed site plan, a data centre layout. No transport document anywhere in it.
For a development this size, that’s genuinely unusual. A CTMP is standard practice, either submitted with the application or attached as a condition before work can start. If one exists for Avonmouth, it isn’t published anywhere the public can find it.
Here’s what is on the record. The site sits directly on the A403, Severn Road — built in 1969–70 specifically to link the M4 motorway network to Avonmouth docks. It already carries around 8,000 vehicles a day.
The nearest homes are 1.8km away, behind commercial and industrial land. This wouldn’t be traffic past someone’s front door. It would be traffic added to an already-loaded arterial route.
And that route already struggles. The M5 at Junction 18, where the A403 meets the motorway network at Avonmouth Bridge, is a well-documented pinch point. A pothole closure this year caused 60-minute delays and six miles of tailback. A separate crash added two-hour delays. One closure sent congestion as far back as Junction 20 and Junction 17 — Clevedon and Cribbs Causeway, both well outside Avonmouth itself.
That’s the honest local picture. Not quiet lanes disturbed by construction traffic. An already-fragile pinch point, asked to absorb months of additional HGV movements — potentially running day and night, since data centre builds often push extended hours to hit deadlines — with no published document telling residents, or the council, how much further it can take.
Bristol Has Said No Before.
Here’s what the operator’s paperwork won’t tell you, and what Bristol City Council’s own record will: it has said no to schemes on this ground before.
Not this scheme, not this operator — the two cases below are different applicants, different technologies, different decades. What they share with 26/12083/F is the ground, the sector, and the specific point of dispute: whether an applicant’s own air quality data can be trusted.
In 2014, the council threw out a proposed bio-energy plant at Avonmouth by five votes to three. Not on a technicality — because councillors said they didn’t have enough information to trust the applicant’s own air quality data, while local residents disputed the figures directly.
Before that, the same council unanimously rejected an entire Viridor waste management scheme on this same stretch of land, with objectors including Bristol Friends of the Earth, Sustainable Redland, and Pilning and Severn Beach Parish Council standing against it.
Green councillor Mary Page — now the largest party group on the council, though not the ward member for Avonmouth itself — has already put on record that the accumulation of Energy from Waste and industrial activity in the Portbury, Avonmouth and Severnside corridor “needs not to be at the detriment of the residents.”
That’s not a comment aimed at this application specifically. It didn’t need to be. The pattern was already visible before this one was submitted.
So when the Crime Impact Statement talks about “high-value employment and infrastructure use consistent with the established industrial character of the surrounding area,” it’s worth remembering what else is established about that area: a council that has, more than once, looked at exactly this kind of scheme on exactly this ground and said no.
Worth noting, too: the operator’s own paperwork already expects this. The same Crime Impact Statement lists organised protest as a live risk to plan around, citing activists who occupied the roof of a Microsoft data centre in Middenmeer, North Holland, in August 2025 — a demonstration by the Dutch group Geef Tegengas, prompted by a Guardian investigation revealing the site stored Israeli military surveillance data. It also cites a legal challenge against a data centre on green belt land in Buckinghamshire, and coordinated nationwide UK protests against data centre expansion in February 2026, organised by Global Action Plan.
The Critical National Infrastructure label attached to sites like this one isn’t bureaucratic box-ticking, either — in 2026, Iranian missile and drone strikes have repeatedly hit Amazon’s own data centres in Bahrain, confirmed by satellite imagery, the first time a state has deliberately targeted commercial cloud infrastructure in wartime.
A city with Bristol’s own record of turning up when it disagrees with something didn’t need to be named for that paragraph to apply here.
Who Actually Gets Served.
Nowhere in the planning application, and nowhere in the press coverage of the Viridor-Rivington partnership, is a customer named. No anchor tenant, no cloud provider, no client.
It’s marketed simply as “AI-ready capacity” — for whoever wants to buy it, wherever they happen to be. That’s standard practice at this stage of a data centre application, commercial confidentiality being what it is, and none of what follows depends on that being unusual.
That matters, because data centres don’t serve a local catchment the way a shop or a bus route does. Fibre connects Avonmouth to the same national and international backbone as everywhere else.
Whatever runs on those servers could be processing data for a company in Bristol, London, or a continent away. Proximity to the site is largely irrelevant to who benefits from the output.
Bristol would host the generators, the risk, and the unanswered water question. It has no guarantee of hosting the customer.
So what does the local community actually get, once it’s built?
Not employment in any meaningful volume — data centres are automated by design, and comparable UK sites run to a few hundred jobs across facilities many times this size.
Not a service Bristol residents will notice or use, because nothing about this facility is built to serve Bristol specifically.
Not the water, not clean air guarantees, not even a say over whether the estuary’s wildlife gets weighed as seriously as the nearest warehouse.
What Avonmouth would get is the generators, the risk, and the runoff. What it would export is compute, sold to whoever’s buying, wherever they happen to be.
Call it what it looks like. Bristol isn’t being asked to host a facility that serves Bristol. It’s being asked to host the infrastructure, absorb the local cost, and take it on trust that the return will show up eventually, in a figure nobody can yet name.
And there’s a reason the council has every incentive to say yes regardless.
Bristol City Council keeps a larger share of business rates than most authorities, as a Business Rates Retention Pilot Authority — a direct financial motive to wave developments like this through, whatever the local cost turns out to be.
Nobody needs to accuse anyone of bad faith to notice that the structure itself rewards approval over scrutiny. The incentive doesn’t prove the outcome. It does explain why “high-value employment and infrastructure use” gets written into a Crime Impact Statement with a straight face.
The Absurdity at the Other End of the City.
Here’s the bit that should make you laugh, if it weren’t so bleak.
Bristol City Council doesn’t even zero out its own gas boilers. Its own buildings, its own estate — City Hall, the crematoriums — are forecast to keep emitting around 2,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, still missing the target the council set itself back in 2019. That’s the sum total of what the authority controls directly, and it’s still too much for it to manage.
Meanwhile, the same council is weighing up whether to approve a facility running on a power source proven to emit more than double the CO2, per unit of electricity, than ordinary gas.
Nobody knows the number. That’s not a caveat, it’s the entire scandal in one sentence. A council that publishes its own struggle to shift 2,000 tonnes is being asked to approve something whose own footprint isn’t published at all.
Every Liveable Neighbourhood scheme, every stretch of protected cycle lane, every pound spent nudging Bristol toward carbon neutral by 2030 — all of it real, all of it hard-won, all of it measured in low thousands of tonnes saved, scheme by scheme, year by year. And at the other end of the city, in Avonmouth, a facility that nobody’s required to measure could plausibly erase several years of that work in a single one.
That’s not a caveat to the Avonmouth story. That’s the Avonmouth story, stated plainly. Bristol is trying to count its way to carbon neutral in hundreds and thousands, one traffic scheme at a time, while the one number that could actually break the sum has been left off the page entirely.
Okay. Let’s Sum It All Up.
Seven hundred metres. Pretty much where we began.
You were told to keep hold of it, and here it is again, doing the only job it was ever going to do.
Not the megawatts, not the missing jobs figure, not the rates bill nobody can yet name. The distance between a facility that gets to skip the water question entirely and a wetland that has no lawyer, no lobbyist, and no seat at Bristol City Council’s planning committee.
The Almighty Gob asked where the water was coming from.
The honest answer, after every document available to the public in Bristol was read, line by line, with the huge and welcome assistance of Google research, is that nobody’s required to say.
That’s not a conspiracy. It’s simpler and worse than that. It’s a form nobody thought to add.
So there it is, Doris. Seven hundred metres. That’s the number that earned it.
© 2026 John Langley aka www.thealmightygob.com. All rights reserved. The odd left too. Though don’t quote me on that.