Essay by Eric Worrall
How long until British data center entrepreneurs get fed up with waiting?
London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds
And up to 70% of stalled energy generation projects are unlikely to be approved, claims regulator Ofgem
Dan Robinson
Mon 10 Feb 2025 // 10:28 UTCWhile the UK government wants to turbocharge datacenter construction, a newly published report says there are already 400 GW worth of outstanding requests for connection to the power grid around London, and regulator Ofgem estimates 60-70 percent of these will never happen.
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These figures are drawn from the EMEA Datacenter Market Update for H2 2024, published by global commercial real estate biz Cushman & Wakefield, and illustrate the challenge that face datacenter developers.
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In addition to power constraints, Cushman & Wakefield also highlights numerous other hurdles that datacenter builders are being confronted by across the EMEA region: limited land availability and strict sustainability regulations, all of which lean heavy on costs and project timelines.
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Read more: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/10/london_has_400_gw_of/?td=rt-3a
I wonder why Britain is so short of energy? Nothing to do with squandering cash on useless renewables, and discouraging development of real energy, right?
This is not an opportunity which will wait.
Either Britain gets its act together and embraces participation in the information age industrial revolution, capitalising on Britain’s concentration of talent, supplying the endless cheap, reliable energy information age entrepreneurs need, or Britain plummets down the rankings of global economies and becomes a has been nation, an unimportant backwater outside the mainstream of the global economy.
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In certain jurisdictions data centres are organising their own energy…
Microsoft turning to NUCLEAR ENERGY to power its future data
Here they must kow tow to Miliband’s department for de-industrialisation.
[snip~ctm]
Once again I find myself inviting down-votes. This comment is gratuitous provocation. If you don’t have anything to say about climate science or net zero, post it somewhere else.
You’re welcome.
And Greens are simply too wet to burn
That’ll get you into serious trouble in Starmer’s UK, even if you escape a mob.
https://humanists.uk/2025/02/04/man-charged-with-crime-after-burning-quran-in-manchester/
Looks like I’m pro humanist UK so far as their stance on blasphemy.
“No disrespect or damage to a “sacred” text can ever justify violence against a human being. The freedom of expression held by private individuals rightly includes forms of expression that others find distasteful or offensive, as long as no person is harmed.”
Shameful. The Islamisation of Great Britain proceeds apace.
“But. But. But. The scientific consensus is we have Climate Emergency and we have to take drastic action now!”. As heard from most politicians.
It’s now Climate Upheaval. Do keep up.
Where did Climate Crisis go?
It was upheaved.
I doubt these are serious applications, it is about eight times the maximum demand of the whole country in winter.
The fact few are getting built will tempt someone to come up with a constructions scheme, or perhaps multiple applications for the same investment in the hope that one part of the country triggers an acceptance.
That’s not to say that the entire system is a complete mess, even without attempting to move transport and heating over to electric.
Given multi gigawatt AI datacenters in the USA are being constructed, and individual data centers on the 400MW scale are currently operating, I would say Britain is already missing out.
EDIT – 400mw not 400gw
50 MW is hyperscale
FYI Microsoft is building three data centres to Finland. Each are a Zone for the Azure . Total capacity 650 MW. Sustainability is reaching an entirely new level by heating buildings with excess heat from new data centers. In Finland we have some 16 000 km of district heat network pipes moving 65 – 115°C water. So Microsoft may get Carbon negative system! Combined Nuclear and Wind power gives clean Energy and the Oil and Gas of the district heating is switched to the warm water from data centers from Microsoft. In fact they are not the first ones, we have several data centeres already heating the district heat Networks in Finland.
Fortum and Microsoft’s data centre project advances climate targets
There’s an equally unsustainable queue of would be renewables generators and batteries. Here’s a look at the excess battery queue:
https://modoenergy.com/research/gb-grid-connections-reform-clean-power-2030-bess-battery-energy-storage-location-distribution-transmission-capacity-january-2025
In any case with the cost of a Net Zero system the only data centres that will be able to afford UK power prices will be those providing monitoring services to government.
I should note it recently transpired that the Starmer government demanded a back door to all of Apple’s encrypted customer cloud storage globally. It has been suggested that this might in part be motivated by other governments seeking to evade laws that notionally prevent them from spying on their own citizens by getting GCHQ to do it for them and then share the intelligence.
“…or Britain plummets down the rankings of global economies and becomes a has been nation, an unimportant backwater outside the mainstream of the global economy…”
Becomes? I submit that ship has sailed.
Another superlative I’ve frequently heard used to describe Blighty of late, in particular by one Col. Douglas MacGregor, is ‘lilliputian’.
#6 GDP on Worldometer, still beating France
Britain still has an opportunity, the concentration of talent which services the banking industry could also service Britain’s data center / AI boom.
But Britain will lose both opportunity and talent if it doesn’t get its act together and catch this new technology wave. People with the skill to create next generation AI, and Britain has plenty of them, will be lured to other countries with 6-7 figure salary offers.
We have plenty of Natural Idiots without creating Artificial Idiots to replace them
Eric,
Is there anything to stop these AI centres in having their own gas generators? The last company I worked for put in two six Megawatt gas turbine generators due to grid constraints.
That was twenty years ago, however, and there may be rules preventing this?
Yep, been a hundred years since Queen Vicky & the Sun Never Setting on British ruled lands.
Most likely that be another 100, if they start right away, before they get back.
The power consumption of AI data centers will drop by half (per whatever “intelligence unit” they use) every couple of years due technological advances, akin to Moore’s law, or the advances that rendered the clogging of New York Streets with horse manure an obsolete problem.
I believe their power consumption will drop when people realize AI does a brilliant job of imitating an underperforming student, and not much more
You are maligning underperforming students!
If AI turns out a real thing increasing productivity of its users, the overall power consumption of AI may still go up due to higher adoption rate. The question is still out, if those end users will consume more or less energy to perform their tasks while using AI vs without it.
I think “increasing productivity of its users“, though the headline intent, is not the actual intent.
Yep. AI is already generating ROI which justifies this scale of investment- in other countries.
I think it’s a case of power and performance increasing together. As faster operations often lead to more switching activity between transistors, resulting in higher power consumption.
A completely new technology may solve that issue.
At the moment they are using brute force to squeeze out more capability, but there is no scenario in which power consumption drops. Any efficiency savings will be used to increase capacity.
The size of such installations will increase even if the energy usage of individual components shrinks. Recall that “No one will need more than 48K of RAM” from the early days of personal computers, and the massive increase in compute power for PCs now. AI datacenters are expanding rapidly, and the power required is also increasing, albeit perhaps not as quickly.
Moores law isn’t valid anymore , probably been that way for nearly a decade.
Anyway it doesn’t say heat output scales alongside computing output
Rolls Royce is well down the path of type approval. If the government doesn’t stand in the way new data centers will be clustered around a selection of nuclear power stations and the surplus electricity will be a nice little earner.
Fibre is cheap to lay. There is no advantage in siting dark offices in London, when the post industrial North is sitting there with brownfield sites and a willing local population.
I think that the coal steel and mill towns will host the new IT centers.
Evidence seems to point the other way, just like the government liking to keep employing staff locally to London, most of the current data centres are clustered close to the growing economic centres and not in areas of cheaply available land.
Specialist skills and cost of equipment presumably outweigh scattering them around.
Perhaps things will change with a more distributed grid, but the current design is to send it all to the cities.
It’s not just shortage of generating capacity, it’s a lack of grid infrastructure – the local network which steps down the HT and carries it and then distributes it at local sector level. The cables and equipment cannot handle the load.
Colocated nuclear reactors would fix this, but I don’t see Britain’s political class approving this anytime soon.
Just as datacentres go where the fibre optic connections are they go where the lines charges are lowest, ie nearest the generators
AI firms are calling on the UK Government to adopt zonal pricing so that the cost of electricity becomes more expensive in areas where demand is high and cheaper in areas where demand is lower.
Thus Scotland would benefit from AI development because of all its wind farms and low density population but England, especially the South East, would have the highest rates and their population would have to live with it.
Can see that going down well 🙂
Gets to the problem – there’s a transition period where you need to convince the right humans to live near the hardware.
Wind farms don’t work well for data centers. They require a constant power supply, 24/7/365. Near where I live there are dozens of such farms normally connected to the local grid but all have diesel backups sufficient for their operation.
Lefty Lunacy: UK Health Minister Defended People Identifying as Llamas
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2025/02/11/lefty-lunacy-uk-health-minister-defended-people-identifying-as-llamas/
Gotta say that even Canada would be a better place for IT entepreneurs than UK right now. Bet that they even have a word for entepreneur in Montreal.
Yep – clearly much too focused on important questions of gender and species identity to worry about Britain’s economy.
It was a joke question. Wasn’t a health minister. They are the lowest rung known as under secretaries who are ministers footstools
400GW? Pffft. That’s only another 100 Drax`s. I’m sure it’ll be worth shipping 100x those wood pellets from California to power them as well. No problem at all, right, Ed?
400 GW? The UK average generation is about 40 GW. 400 GW would be hard to find however the power was generated.
I guess it costs little to put in an application.
Britain would struggle to muster even one gigawatt right now, that is the problem.
I have no doubt some planning applications are fishing expeditions but there is real demand behind this activity.
London merchant banks were early adopters of AI, I was personally on the fringes of one project. But now they are being outclassed by giant AI systems in other countries.
How long do you think that can continue until London loses its banking crown? These are serious people, well able to muster the billions of dollars it costs to build such projects.
Miscalculation . 400MW more likely as a hyperscale datacentre is 50MW. Many aren’t even that
400GW would almost equate to the total electricity output of the USA..
That is where AI is heading: Every doubling of capacity more than doubles the profit, so far there appears to be no limit to how far you can stretch this.
Who is going to buy that?
Microsoft current global datacentres are around 2.2GW in total. Maybe 100 sites.
Recheck the 400GW claim
The British people are the only ones who can fix this and I’m not thinking of the ballot box. Your only problem is crappy government, crappy government will not fix itself. The people have to stand up and say no. It doesn’t take a majority a large minority will do.
400GW?
A hyperscale datacentre is 50MW. That makes 8000 of the largest datacentres.waiting approval.
Too silly for words