More than 100 new datacentres in the UK plan to burn gas to generate electricity, some potentially doing so permanently.
British officials say this is an inevitable consequence of a years-long wait to connect to the National Grid, and raises an “interesting question” about the UK’s climate targets.
“There’s 100GW of datacentre projects in the queue,” said Stuart Okin, the director of cyber regulation and AI at Ofgem.
“Clearly that’s not all going to be able to connect [to the grid]. If a project isn’t going to get a connection, it is going to have to come up with an alternative method.”
Okin spoke on the sidelines of All-Energy, the UK’s largest renewable and low-carbon energy conference.
Officials, businesspeople and activists attending the event in Glasgow acknowledged a marked shift over the past year in willingness of UK developers – and authorities – to consider using fossil fuels to power the UK’s AI ambitions.
mutexsprinkles on
Total UK generation plus imports is around 30GW, so 100GW is delusional.
I think another question should be how is it they predictions for power grids are that they will fail if say everyone were to shift to electric cars but building immense data centers doesn’t have the same risk?
TheScapeQuest on
Regional pricing and suddenly you’ll see these data centres popping up in Scotland, not London
CAElite on
Not just data centres, I used to work supplying said gas & diesel generators. We had a wide array of sites, mostly with the same complaints about grid connection.
Most amusing one always for me was supplying a 500kW diesel generator to a council depot who did not have the incoming supply capacity on site to run any EV chargers for their new electric van fleet.
Our grid infrastructure in this country, like most of our other infrastructure, has been in decline since the 80s.
mattcannon2 on
Nah if Open AI wants to destroy the UK, then can at least use renewables. This is Antithetical to promises to lower energy prices (which I thought was supposed to be too high for this kind of thing anyway?)
Helen83FromVillage on
Am I right that if it will be built in another country, then they will use magic energy?
They pay for energy – we sell energy. Seems like a win-win deal to have more jobs here.
And we have big plans of building green plants, improving the grid, and so on – so step by step, we will have a profitable industry, which will collect money from other countries.
Doctor_Womble on
The UK is the perfect place for Data Centres. We’re famous for our huge tracks of unused land and low energy costs.
Obvious_Yard_1846 on
I work in this space, the data center rush is utterly.mad. There are actually useful, heavy industry projects that aren’t going ahead because it’s easier to grant the same land to a data centre making AI slop
Ok-Host2005 on
Utter madness. What happened to reducing energy usage? It seems like everyone has gone AI crazy. Companies that were untouchable money printing machines are now loading up with massive amounts of debt that will never be repaid.
AgeOfCardiff on
Yay, not only will I be put out of a job by AI my energy bills will skyrocket even more!
I’m getting real tired.
Skeet_fighter on
At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, we should just not.
I’ve yet to see any personal, organisational or national benefit to all the AI shite that’s currently going on, except for people losing jobs and a transparent attempt by the 1% to centralise even more wealth into their back pocket.
So we should just not engage with the AI shitfest.
Sunbreak_ on
Given all the stupid amounts of money being thrown around for datacentres at the moment surely they can afford to supply their own energy in a green way. Why not make it a condition of planning that they must build their demands worth of renewables (solar, wind, SMR) and grid scale energy storage to minimise the impact, along with effective cooling systems that don’t degrade local water supply.
We don’t want what we can see in the USA, centres that are draining local water supplies and storage, then also burning so much gas its negatively impacting air quality.
We were seeing momentum with the green switch over, and in all honesty, if this AI bubble hadn’t grown beyond all reason absorbing cash and resource we could’ve uses those trillions to fix the worlds energy supply so much, the middle east doing its regular implosions wouldn’t cause anywhere near as much of an impact. Its just sad.
FraGough on
We need those Rolls Royce SMR’s to be rolled out post-haste!
ChazCharlie on
Solar Turbines, who market their generators for datacentres, have units in the 1-40 MW range, and show pictures with maybe 4 units in operation. Assuming one is offline for maintenance and taking max size with some margin for the peak load, that’s about 100MW per centre. 100 centres would therefore be 10GW.
allen_jb on
Before anyone gets too excited over this, it’s highly likely that the vast majority of these “new datacentres” are purely speculative.
More generally there’s very recently been a global trend of datacentres being put on hold or outright cancelled. Many projects haven’t broken ground, or have not made significant build progress.
This should also be an indicator that the price rises for AI users have not finished – even with recent pricing regime changes / increases, you’re still paying massively subsidized prices – which obviously leads to questions about exactly how much capacity expansion will actually be needed once usage levels adjust to these prices.
Even for the datacentres that are actually built, someone’s going to have to pay for that buildout and their energy usage.
JackStrawWitchita on
Kinda odd to be making these huge infrastructure plans based on usage of a specific cutting edge computer design. The AI developers are coming up with new workarounds that greatly reduce the need for specific hardware. For example, the MTP protocol can literally double capacity of hardware for LLMs using software. And there are more innovations to avoid the heavy use of hardware rolling out every day.
I’m confident the capacity planning of these big data centres is based on what is now very old technical infrastructure and certainly no longer need to be this big.
Different_Bake_611 on
Why are all these data centres needed all of a sudden?
Accomplished_Pen5061 on
Why can’t they bid for grid connections and thus help fund the project?
I don’t understand why AI companies can’t help out the grid upgrades if they’re the ones who’ll benefit.
What’s the limiting factor on getting things connected to the grid and why can’t they throw money at the problem to get it to go away?
7777cloudstrife on
Don’t tell your local crackheads that they’re full of precious metals please /s
20 Comments
More than 100 new datacentres in the UK plan to burn gas to generate electricity, some potentially doing so permanently.
British officials say this is an inevitable consequence of a years-long wait to connect to the National Grid, and raises an “interesting question” about the UK’s climate targets.
“There’s 100GW of datacentre projects in the queue,” said Stuart Okin, the director of cyber regulation and AI at Ofgem.
“Clearly that’s not all going to be able to connect [to the grid]. If a project isn’t going to get a connection, it is going to have to come up with an alternative method.”
Okin spoke on the sidelines of All-Energy, the UK’s largest renewable and low-carbon energy conference.
Officials, businesspeople and activists attending the event in Glasgow acknowledged a marked shift over the past year in willingness of UK developers – and authorities – to consider using fossil fuels to power the UK’s AI ambitions.
Total UK generation plus imports is around 30GW, so 100GW is delusional.
https://grid.iamkate.com/
I think another question should be how is it they predictions for power grids are that they will fail if say everyone were to shift to electric cars but building immense data centers doesn’t have the same risk?
Regional pricing and suddenly you’ll see these data centres popping up in Scotland, not London
Not just data centres, I used to work supplying said gas & diesel generators. We had a wide array of sites, mostly with the same complaints about grid connection.
Most amusing one always for me was supplying a 500kW diesel generator to a council depot who did not have the incoming supply capacity on site to run any EV chargers for their new electric van fleet.
Our grid infrastructure in this country, like most of our other infrastructure, has been in decline since the 80s.
Nah if Open AI wants to destroy the UK, then can at least use renewables. This is Antithetical to promises to lower energy prices (which I thought was supposed to be too high for this kind of thing anyway?)
Am I right that if it will be built in another country, then they will use magic energy?
They pay for energy – we sell energy. Seems like a win-win deal to have more jobs here.
And we have big plans of building green plants, improving the grid, and so on – so step by step, we will have a profitable industry, which will collect money from other countries.
The UK is the perfect place for Data Centres. We’re famous for our huge tracks of unused land and low energy costs.
I work in this space, the data center rush is utterly.mad. There are actually useful, heavy industry projects that aren’t going ahead because it’s easier to grant the same land to a data centre making AI slop
Utter madness. What happened to reducing energy usage? It seems like everyone has gone AI crazy. Companies that were untouchable money printing machines are now loading up with massive amounts of debt that will never be repaid.
Yay, not only will I be put out of a job by AI my energy bills will skyrocket even more!
I’m getting real tired.
At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, we should just not.
I’ve yet to see any personal, organisational or national benefit to all the AI shite that’s currently going on, except for people losing jobs and a transparent attempt by the 1% to centralise even more wealth into their back pocket.
So we should just not engage with the AI shitfest.
Given all the stupid amounts of money being thrown around for datacentres at the moment surely they can afford to supply their own energy in a green way. Why not make it a condition of planning that they must build their demands worth of renewables (solar, wind, SMR) and grid scale energy storage to minimise the impact, along with effective cooling systems that don’t degrade local water supply.
We don’t want what we can see in the USA, centres that are draining local water supplies and storage, then also burning so much gas its negatively impacting air quality.
We were seeing momentum with the green switch over, and in all honesty, if this AI bubble hadn’t grown beyond all reason absorbing cash and resource we could’ve uses those trillions to fix the worlds energy supply so much, the middle east doing its regular implosions wouldn’t cause anywhere near as much of an impact. Its just sad.
We need those Rolls Royce SMR’s to be rolled out post-haste!
Solar Turbines, who market their generators for datacentres, have units in the 1-40 MW range, and show pictures with maybe 4 units in operation. Assuming one is offline for maintenance and taking max size with some margin for the peak load, that’s about 100MW per centre. 100 centres would therefore be 10GW.
Before anyone gets too excited over this, it’s highly likely that the vast majority of these “new datacentres” are purely speculative.
The UKs total datacentre capacity in 2024 was 1.6GW according to a [Commons Library briefing](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10315/#:~:text=The%20UK%20had%20approximately)
The Guardian article says there’s 100GW of datacentres “in the queue”. That’s more than 60x the current capacity.
Side note: This GW capacity figure is double what [The Register reported on this in Feb](https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/02/27/50-gw-of-datacenter-demand-queues-up-for-uk-grid-access/4531850) – but even that’s >30x current capacity.
More generally there’s very recently been a global trend of datacentres being put on hold or outright cancelled. Many projects haven’t broken ground, or have not made significant build progress.
This should also be an indicator that the price rises for AI users have not finished – even with recent pricing regime changes / increases, you’re still paying massively subsidized prices – which obviously leads to questions about exactly how much capacity expansion will actually be needed once usage levels adjust to these prices.
Even for the datacentres that are actually built, someone’s going to have to pay for that buildout and their energy usage.
Kinda odd to be making these huge infrastructure plans based on usage of a specific cutting edge computer design. The AI developers are coming up with new workarounds that greatly reduce the need for specific hardware. For example, the MTP protocol can literally double capacity of hardware for LLMs using software. And there are more innovations to avoid the heavy use of hardware rolling out every day.
I’m confident the capacity planning of these big data centres is based on what is now very old technical infrastructure and certainly no longer need to be this big.
Why are all these data centres needed all of a sudden?
Why can’t they bid for grid connections and thus help fund the project?
I don’t understand why AI companies can’t help out the grid upgrades if they’re the ones who’ll benefit.
What’s the limiting factor on getting things connected to the grid and why can’t they throw money at the problem to get it to go away?
Don’t tell your local crackheads that they’re full of precious metals please /s