Datacenter developers in the UK are turning to gas for power generation amid lengthy wait times for a connection to the electricity grid.
The British government unveiled plans at the start of the year to ramp up the country's AI development, allowing for the building of lots of additional infrastructure – datacenters in particular – including the setting up of so-called "AI Growth Zones".
However, the UK's moribund planning process sometimes leads to waiting years for new projects to get connected up to the electricity grid. The chief executive of Segro, a major commercial property developer, said last year that it sometimes takes "a number of years" for local substations to be upgraded in order to increase grid capacity.
Now it appears that some developers are tired of the wait and are looking to generate their own electrical power on-site instead. National Gas, the operator of Britain's gas pipeline network, has confirmed that five large datacenter projects in the south of England have made enquiries about connections, as first revealed by The Financial Times.
This is a situation that has already played out across the Atlantic, with pipeline companies in the US disclosing last year that they were getting lots of interest from bit barn operators to supply them with large quantities of natural gas because of delays in getting wired up to the grid.
Typically, the end result is the campus gaining a small on-site power station to supply electricity for the individual data halls. This is most likely generated by gas turbines, although in some cases solid-oxide fuel cells might be used, as is the case in some sites managed by global datacenter giant Equinix.
National Gas said it could not disclose specific details relating to any of the requests for reasons of commercial confidentiality, but it told the FT that the five sites combined would require roughly 2.5 gigawatts of capacity, enough electricity to power a couple of million homes.
This highlights some of the problems faced by the UK government when it comes to its ambitious plans to push AI everywhere as a driver for economic recovery. This will see lots of new datacenters popping up everywhere to power this revolution, all of which need powering. Energy demand from bit barns is forecast to grow 500 percent over the next decade as a consequence.
"We are going to build more labs, more datacenters - and we're going to do it much, much more quickly," Prime Minister Keir Starmer said during the opening address of London Tech Week in June.
But a report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change warned earlier this month that Britain is unlikely to meet its 2030 target of having 6 GW of AI-ready infrastructure on UK soil, blaming planning and permit delays as well as constraints with the national grid.
The government formed the AI Energy Council earlier this year, made up of a cozy cabal of big cloud operators and the energy industry, plus Technology Secretary Peter Kyle and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.
This was charged with ensuring the UK's energy system is ready to support the necessary AI and compute infrastructure, but has so far operated under a veil of secrecy, revealing little regarding what happened during its two meetings held so far.
We inquired again what actions the AI Energy Council is taking to upgrade the National Grid so that it can cope with the increasing electricity demands of datacenters along with everything else?
"Through the AI Energy Council, we are bringing together the likes of NESO, EDF, Microsoft and Google in solving the energy challenges of AI, as we realise its potential to deliver economic growth," a spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero told us.
"We are also working with Ofgem and network companies to reform the outdated connections process and speed up delivery of new infrastructure, freeing up grid capacity to make it easier for datacenters to secure a timely connection."
We understand that the government's Industrial Strategy, published in the summer, laid out further steps intended to help get "strategic demand projects" such as datacenters connected to the grid, including a new connections accelerator service expected later this year.
In the meantime, those big bit barn developments are looking to provide their own power, but this can bring its own set of issues. Elon Musk's xAI caused uproar this year over its massive datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee, which is alleged to be emitting large amounts of air pollution from its gas turbines. ®
Source: The register