Innova opens consultation on 148-acre Cheshire data center as residents object

Innova has opened consultation on the Spodegreen Data Center, a 148-acre proposal outside Little Bollington in Cheshire, and the first public event this week drew more than 100 residents. The site, currently farmed and adjacent to Lymm Road and the M56 motorway, sits within the 5,500-acre Tatton Estate, but the proposed capacity has not been disclosed.

What Innova has said is that the facility would draw power from the main grid rather than from the solar farm included in the plans, and that a closed-loop system would hold water use down; it also says the project would create 350 jobs, though the coverage does not specify whether those are construction roles, permanent ones, or a mix.

Opposition arrived quickly and in the register that now decides these projects: resident Mike Reed, quoted by the BBC, described the building as a "massive great industrial monster" and pointed to the site's green belt status at the edge of Greater Manchester's conurbation. "You can't start creeping into that, or you destroy the whole of the green belt throughout Cheshire," he said.

Innova is a renewable energy firm operating solar farms and energy storage schemes across the north west of England and Wales, and it has already moved on grid capacity at scale: in 2025 it submitted plans to National Grid seeking connections for ten data centers with a combined 4.4GW. The Cheshire site was not among them, which makes Spodegreen a separate proposition and leaves open where its grid capacity would come from if not from that portfolio.

The company is working with JLL on the development, and a planning application is likely to be submitted later this year or early in 2027. What happened this week was not a decision but the opening of a record.

That record matters more than it once did, because consent, water, and load-class rules now set the pace of the data center buildout well before a lease is signed. Cheshire is not a major data center hub — Manchester next door is the growing market, and the M56 corridor is the argument for pushing west. A 148-acre green belt site with a solar farm attached is also an energy-land play as much as a compute one, which is why the missing capacity figure is the number to watch; Innova has not put a megawatt count on Spodegreen, and until it does, the 350 jobs and the grid connection are the only sizes on offer.