The Electric Village

What can Highland Aluminum Works tell us about the factory’s age?

They laid them to rest where they fell, on a knoll above the water, marking each grave with concrete—the only material the land offered in abundance. Twenty-two graves stand there. Most stones bear only the word “Unknown.” Three are named: Darkey Cunningham, John McFadden, John McKenzie. One marks the resting place of a woman, Mrs Riley, who died in 1909.

They were building a dam.

From 1905 to 1909, about three thousand navvies, mostly Irish and Scottish, built the Blackwater Dam on the edge of Rannoch Moor in Scotland. The dam was a huge concrete wall, 3,112 feet long and 86 feet high. Sir John Jackson Ltd. built it for the British Aluminum Company. The workers lived in a camp below the dam, with no road in or out, no law, and dangerous weather that could be deadly if you misjudged the walk across the moor. Patrick MacGill, a laborer from County Donegal, described this world in his book Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of a Navvy (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1914). His account remains the clearest picture of the dam’s human cost.

The company did not choose the glen for its scenery. Aluminum is made by electrolysis, not mining. The Hall-Héroult process dissolves alumina in molten cryolite and uses a lot of electricity, which is the costly part. British Aluminum needed a place with plenty of falling water and no competition. Loch Leven offered both.

Water flowed through eleven Pelton wheels, generating 25,725 kilowatts, or about 160 gigawatt-hours each year, with a steady load factor of around 80 percent. This was an ongoing demand, not just a peak. The smelter used electricity continuously, day and night, year-round. The plant produced about 8,000 tonnes of aluminum annually, which was shipped out, while the profits went to shareholders who never visited the moor.

Yet the village gained something notable. Kinlochleven, created for the workers, became the first place on earth where all homes glowed with electric light. It earned the name the Electric Village. Men whose fathers had read by the shine of peat fires now lived beneath the steady shine of electric bulbs, even though no road reached the village until about 1918.

But time moved on. Eight thousand tonnes a year became a drop in the bucket next to modern smelters producing 250,000 tonnes. The plant shut its doors in June 2000. In 1991, just over a thousand people lived in about 420 households; by 2020, only around 760 remained. Now, the powerhouse feeds electricity into the National Grid. The old coke bunker brews beer, and the research building welcomes hikers as a hostel on the West Highland Way—most of whom pass the graves without a glance.

Kinlochleven was a data center.

The Load Never Drops

If you trade aluminum for data, the story barely changes. Vast data centers rise where power is cheap, water flows, land is ready, and the grid is strong. They transform electricity into an invisible product that vanishes the moment it is made. These centers hum without pause, day and night, imitating the old smelters. Crowds build them, but only a handful stay to keep them running. They bring both gifts and burdens to their surroundings, though rarely to the same people. And when the winds shift, the centers can move on.

This is what the word “cloud” so often conceals. The cloud is, in truth, a massive building somewhere, devouring electricity, rooted in a real place with its own water, its own local government.

Europe is starting to see these buildings for what they truly are. They are not just warehouses of computers, but vital organs of society, concentrating physical power and carrying responsibilities to the community, the environment, workers, and local institutions. This is an important change, and it deserves more attention than the usual comments about Europe making rules for things built by America.

As many know from my classes, I have used a four-part frame for years when judging a technology: planet, people, prosperity, purpose. Europe’s approach competently adds a fifth, and that fifth is what makes the other four operative, as I have discussed in my classes.

Planet	What energy, water, materials, and emissions does digital infrastructure require?
People	Does AI and its infrastructure protect dignity, rights, privacy, safety, and community well-being?
Prosperity	Who gains from digital capacity, and who bears its costs?
Purpose	What human and social goods are these systems meant to serve?
Guardrails	What rules make concentrated technological power accountable to the common good?

Planet: Counting What the Building Actually Takes

For decades, the central question about computing was economic. Faster, cheaper, more scalable. Europe is pressing a different one: what does this cost the ecological community it sits inside?

The numbers are no longer small. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centers consumed about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, roughly 1.5 percent of global electricity, and projects that figure to roughly double to about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, just under 3 percent of the global total. Europe’s own increase over that period is put at more than 45 terawatt-hours.

Aggregates hide what matters: concentration. Ireland is the clearest case in Europe. The Central Statistics Office reported that data centers took 23 percent of all metered electricity in the state in 2025, up from 5 percent in 2015. That is 7,663 gigawatt-hours, against 28 percent for every household in the country combined. Urban homes accounted for 18 percent and rural homes for 9 percent. One industry, on one small grid, now consumes within striking distance of all residential demand.

Europe’s first regulatory response was not a limit. It acted as a mirror.

Under the recast Energy Efficiency Directive and Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364, every data center in the Union with an installed information technology power demand of at least 500 kilowatts must report to a European database: operational data, energy and sustainability indicators, installed compute capacity, and data traffic. The first reports, covering 2023, were due on 15 September 2024, and reports have been due annually on 15 May since. From the submissions, the Commission derives four indicators: Power Usage Effectiveness, Water Usage Effectiveness, Energy Reuse Factor, and Renewable Energy Factor.

The second step is now underway. On 27 March 2026, the Commission opened a call for feedback on a draft regulation establishing a common Union rating scheme for data centers, with electronic labels issued automatically from that same database, covering energy consumption, water use, renewable sourcing, waste heat recovery, and grid performance. The consultation closed on 23 April 2026, and the scheme forms were included in a broader Data Center Energy Efficiency Package alongside preparatory work on minimum performance standards.

Reporting does not mean efficiency, and having a label does not set a limit. But when a building is labeled, it can be compared to others. This allows planning authorities, utilities, city councils, and customers to discuss and debate its impact. That is how the conversation begins.

From Customer to Participant

The bigger change is quieter than reporting requirements, but far more significant.

The old model treats a data center as a customer. It contracts for power, it consumes what it contracts for, and the public task is to supply enough electricity, water, and transmission to meet private demand. The emerging European model treats it as a participant in the systems it depends on.

Ireland has gone furthest, and it went there under duress. On 16 December 2025, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities published a new Large Energy User connection policy replacing the 2021 direction that had effectively frozen new Dublin connections. New data centers with a maximum import capacity of 10 megavolt-amperes or more must now bring dispatchable on-site or nearby generation or storage matching that capacity and participate in the Single Electricity Market. Facilities at or above 1 megavolt-ampere must source at least 80 percent of annual electricity from new Irish renewable generation within six years of energization. Compliant facilities are exempt from mandatory demand curtailment in a system emergency. The bargain is explicit: bring your own capacity, and you keep your power when the grid is short.

The Cloud and AI Development Act, which the Commission published on 3 June 2026, applies the same logic in reverse, as an incentive rather than a condition. Its stated objective is to at least triple the Union’s data center capacity within five to seven years, taking installed demand from roughly 10 gigawatts to about 35 gigawatts by 2030, backed by some 200 billion euros, most of it private. Projects that meet sustainability criteria, or that use European-designed chips, get faster permitting, priority grid connections, and lower network fees. Operators are expected to contribute demand-side flexibility, design waste heat reuse into the facility, and coordinate with national energy planning. On the same day, fourteen industry associations signed tripartite arrangements with energy stakeholders and public authorities under the Strategic Roadmap on Digitalization and AI for the Energy Sector.

Waste heat is the clearest test of whether any of this is real, because it is the point where a data center stops being a consumer of public resources and starts giving something back. It already works. In Tallaght, in South Dublin, heat recovered from an Amazon facility has fed a district heating network operated by Fortum and developed by Codema since December 2022, raised to 85 degrees Celsius by heat pumps, serving Technological University Dublin and a South Dublin County Council building, with roughly 47,000 square meters of public buildings, 3,000 square meters of commercial space, and 135 apartments in the planned scope, saving an estimated 1,400 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and delivering heat 10 to 15 percent below the alternatives. Stockholm has run heat recovery from data centers into its district network for longer and at greater scale. Meta’s facility in Odense has done the same in Denmark.

None of this happens out of goodwill. It happens because the building must answer for the systems it relies on.

So the questions a proposed facility now faces in parts of Europe are these:

• Where does the electricity come from, and is it new generation or a claim on existing supply?
• Can the load be reduced or moved when the grid is stressed?
• How much water, from where, under what local hydrology?
• Can the waste heat reach homes, public buildings, industry?
• What happens to local energy prices?
• Who benefits, beyond the owners and their customers?

These are not just engineering questions. They are civic questions, and they are the same ones that could have been asked in a Highland glen back in 1905.

People: What the Machine Does to Persons

The common description of the EU AI Act is that it is restrictive. A more accurate description is that it is a fundamental rights instrument that says very little about the ground the machines stand on.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 entered into force on 1 August 2024. Its risk tiers, prohibitions, and transparency duties focus on what systems do to people: discrimination, surveillance, manipulation, safety, along with the erosion of democratic participation. It is thin on the environment, and honesty requires saying so. Article 95 encourages voluntary codes of conduct that may address environmental protection, including energy-efficient design and training. Annex XI requires providers of general-purpose models to document known or estimated energy consumption. Standardization work may follow. That is honesty and exhortation, not obligation. Several environmental organizations called it a missed opportunity when the text had been agreed, and they were right.

The binding environmental work sits elsewhere, in energy law rather than AI law. That division is worth noticing, because it means Europe’s social ethic of AI infrastructure is being assembled out of two statutes that were not designed to meet.

They do meet in the community. If a facility is built in a place, the place is not scenery. Who gets the construction jobs, and who gets the twenty permanent ones? Who absorbs three years of heavy traffic on a road built for tractors? Who pays if network costs rise? Who has a say in decisions about land, water, and connection capacity? What happens when a community’s physical resources are converted into computing capacity serving users and investors it will never meet?

Catholic social thought has an old answer to that class of question, and it is not a soft one. 

Economic and technological systems are judged by their effect on persons, families, workers, communities, and the vulnerable, not by their efficiency or their aggregate output. People are not inputs. The system exists for them.

(Let that sentence sit a while in your mind, memorize it, and use it in discussion with the community as you debate data centers in your area)

The Case for Building Anyway

The argument against all of this deserves its strongest form, not a convenient one, and it has four parts worth taking seriously.

Europe is regulating a market it does not own. The Union writes rules for infrastructure largely designed, financed, and operated by American firms running American silicon. Reporting duties and rating labels are costs imposed on assets whose strategic decisions are made elsewhere. Tripling capacity while raising the compliance burden may mean European money buys American capability at a higher cost.

Compliance is regressive. A 500-kilowatt threshold catches the hyperscaler and the mid-sized regional colocation provider alike, and only one of them has a policy team. Rules of this kind tend to consolidate an industry rather than discipline it, and consolidation is the opposite of the sovereignty Europe says it wants.

Load leaves; emissions do not. If Ireland makes connection expensive, the workload moves. It may move to a grid with a worse carbon intensity, weaker labor law, and no reporting at all. A rule that improves a European average while raising global emissions has not accomplished anything a planet would notice.

The industry’s record is better than the rhetoric. Data center operators have driven power usage effectiveness down over two decades while compute grew by orders of magnitude, are among the largest corporate purchasers of new renewable generation on earth, and fund grid reinforcement that other users then benefit from. Compared with the last major industrial load to arrive in Europe, this one arrives asking to pay for its own transmission.

Each of those points is true, and none of them settles the matter. The Irish figures answer the third and fourth together: 23 percent of a national grid is not a rounding error that relocation solves, and voluntary quality did not prevent the concentration that produced it. Carbon leakage is a reason to write rules that travel, through trade measures, procurement standards, and disclosure that follows the workload, rather than a reason to write none. Threshold effects on smaller operators are a drafting problem, and drafting problems have drafting solutions. And the sovereignty objection cuts both ways: a continent that cannot set conditions on infrastructure built in its own territory has already conceded the point it claims to be defending.

The real European view is not that regulation comes without cost. It is that the cost is worth it, and someone should clearly state what is being gained in return.

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Prosperity: For Whom?

Europe is not arguing against data centers. It proposes building many more. The argument is about the terms.

A facility can generate enormous value. The distribution of that value is a separate fact, and not a derivative one. If a community supplies land, water, grid capacity, and infrastructure expansions while the gains flow to hyperscale operators, distant shareholders, and customers on another continent, the arrangement can be highly profitable without being prosperous in any sense a resident would recognize.

The more demanding version of the question:

• Do local and regional firms gain capability, or only construction contracts?
• Does research capacity in the region expand?
• Can public institutions better serve people?
• Are skills built locally, or imported and then withdrawn?
• Does the infrastructure create durability or dependence?
• Are environmental costs reduced, or moved somewhere with less capacity to object?

Kinlochleven glowed with electric lights in every home and kept a graveyard on the moor. Both are true. 

The real question is not whether a project brings benefits, but whether those who gain are the same as those who pay the price—and whether anyone with a stake had a chance to ask questions before the first stone was laid.

Purpose: What Is the Intelligence For?

European regulation rarely uses the word, but purpose sits underneath the whole enterprise. If we are expanding computing capacity at this speed, toward what?

A facility optimized for return asks how much compute it can sell. A facility oriented to the common good asks how much human flourishing that compute enables, and at what ecological and social cost. Those are not the same question, and only one of them has an obvious metric, which is precisely why the other keeps losing.

Computing can serve genuine public goods: medical research, climate simulation, grid optimization, disaster response, accessible education, scientific research, tools that give disabled people capacities they did not have. It can further deepen surveillance, concentrate wealth, intensify extraction, displace meaningful work without provision for the displaced, and put communities into competition for water.

Purpose alone does not promise a good outcome. But without it, efficiency becomes the only law: whatever can be scaled, will be; whatever can be automated, will be; whatever can be measured, will be sold. That is not enough for a technology of this magnitude.

The Factory of the AI Age

The nineteenth century learned this lesson at the factory gate.

Industrial concentration did not simply produce goods. It reorganized labor, family life, cities, class relations, political influence, and the natural world. On 15 May 1891, Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum and asked what obligations should accompany that order. He did not ask whether industry should exist. It plainly did and would. He asked whether industrial power would serve workers’ dignity and the common good, or whether people would become disposable inputs to a system organized around wealth and control.

That parallel is not an essayist’s conceit. The Church has drawn it explicitly.

On 10 May 2025, two days after his election, Leo XIV explained his choice of name to the College of Cardinals: “Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. Today, the Church offers to all her treasure of social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence.” Four months earlier, on 28 January 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education had issued Antiqua et nova, a note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence.

The argument arrived in full on 25 May 2026, when the Vatican published Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV’s first encyclical, signed on 15 May, the anniversary of Rerum Novarum. It runs to some 42,300 words across five chapters. It refuses the easy position, holding that technology “should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity.” It insists that the pursuit of greater profits “cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs,” and warns of workers pushed into forced inactivity. It argues that governments cannot leave the future of these systems to private companies, calling for strong juridical frameworks, independent oversight, informed users, and a political system that does not abdicate. It calls for politics “capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating.”

And it touches the ground. The encyclical notes that these systems require large quantities of energy and water, affecting creation, and it speaks of the scarred, injured, and worn-down bodies of the workers who extract the rare earth elements the machines are made from, naming that a new form of slavery.

This is the same claim Europe’s directives make, only in the language of kilowatts and reporting deadlines. The data center is the factory of the AI age: the place where computational power gathers, where electricity and water are transformed into digital capability, where global supply chains touch down, where the so-called cloud finally has an address. Here, questions of ownership, labor, environmental cost, public good, and democratic authority all come to rest on real ground.

Europe’s rules are an incomplete, debated effort to make sure the factory serves society, not the serving way around. This is a more meaningful idea than simply saying Europe regulates while America builds.

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Short enough for an index card. Long enough to be difficult.

1. Planet. Can the Earth sustain the energy, water, materials, and waste that our digital infrastructure now requires?
2. People. Does this technology strengthen dignity, freedom, meaningful work, privacy, and community, or subordinate people to the needs of the system?
3. Prosperity. Who receives the benefits of AI infrastructure, and who pays its environmental, financial, and social costs?
4. Purpose. What are we building all this intelligence for? What flourishing, service, knowledge, care, and community are meant to result?
5. Guardrails. What laws, standards, institutions, and democratic practices keep technological power responsible to the common good?

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These questions do not oppose innovation. They exist to hold innovation to account.

Follow the West Highland Way north from Rannoch Moor, and you descend into Kinlochleven. The lights still burn. The power still flows, though now it feeds the grid, not the pot line. The graveyard lies just off the path: twenty-two concrete stones on a rise above the reservoir, most marked only as unknown.

No one asked those men what the aluminum was for. No one asked the glen what it would cost. The light in every house was real, and so was the earth where they were buried. The company that brought the light and dug the graves vanished in June 2000, when the numbers no longer added up.

Now we are building the next generation—thousands of data centers, rising faster than any infrastructure before, in real places with their own names, their own water, their own local governments.

This time, we have the chance to ask our questions before we build. 

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Sources Used in this article:

• Patrick MacGill, Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of a Navvy (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1914): Wikipedia: Patrick MacGill; Cameron McNeish, “Hills of the Dead End”
• Global data center electricity demand: IEA, Energy and AI, “Energy demand from AI”
• Irish electricity figures: Central Statistics Office, Data Centers Metered Electricity Consumption 2025
• EED reporting obligations and Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364: European Data Center Association; White & Case, “Data centres and energy consumption: evolving EU regulatory setting and outlook for 2026”
• EU rating scheme for data centers: European Commission, “Rating scheme for data centres in the EU: Commission launches call for feedback”, 27 March 2026
• Cloud and AI Development Act: European Commission, Cloud and AI Development Act; Jones Day, “EU Data Center Rules Combine Expansion Incentives with New Energy Obligations”
• Irish connection policy: Arthur Cox, “New connection policy for data centres in Ireland”
• Tallaght District Heating Scheme: Reasons to be Cheerful, “Heat from an Amazon Data Center Is Warming Dublin’s Buildings”
• EU AI Act environmental provisions: Article 95, EU Artificial Intelligence Act; Heinrich Böll Stiftung, “The EU AI Act and environmental protection: the case for a missed opportunity”
• Leo XIV on his name: Vatican News, 10 May 2025
• Antiqua et nova, 28 January 2025: Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education
• Magnifica Humanitas, signed 15 May 2026, published 25 May 2026: Vatican; Vatican News; TIME.

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Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.

The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn and is central to Catholic Social Teaching.

As a cultural historian, I am grateful for my experience in the Benedictine tradition in college and in the Graduate School of Theology. In Benedictine life, “Ora et labora” means that prayer and work are inseparable.

I am not a professional academic. I am a practitioner who reads. And that is Wisdom Speaking. — someone who applies theological thinking to technology and its consequences.