OK great, UK is building loads of AI datacenters. How are we going to power that? The UK government's AI Energy Council held its first meeting this week, in an attempt to square the circle of its AI ambitions with the state of the country's power infrastructure and having the most expensive energy in Europe. UK UK prepared to throw planning rules out the window for massive datacenters READ MORE Energy …
Shurely even Ed Milliwatt realises that you can't power a datacentre with an intermittent energy source.. But then again he is a nitwit..
Ideally, we would build some nukes to power the bullshit barns, then the AI bubble pops and the rest of us can use the cheap energy that follows. But nukes sadly take very a long time to build now, due to some rather excessive regulation which the fossil fuel industries lobbied for, to save themselves from nuclear competition..
What we'll probably end up with is more renewables, and regional pricing, so us plebs have to fork out a fortune for energy while the bullshit barns get it on the cheap if they build in Scotland. Then the incentive to modernise and upgrade the transmission network disappears (why invest money to alleviate grid constraints if you can simply charge more for electricity in constrained regions?), then something goes bang and all the lights go out. Welcome to Britain.
Sadly I think we will end up with more CCGT and an overstretched grid.
But this government is smart. So British (ok, Chinese) Steel is about to shut down. The cunning plan is to get taxpayers to import coke to keep it running for a few more months. The UK can produce our own coke, but the government won't let it. Mining our own would improve supply security and create jobs. But the government is smart. The country that gave the world the Industrial Revolution will be deindustrialised, because Starmer, Millibrain etc are smart.
That's where the Conservatives could campaign around a promise to get rid of renewable energy, re-open the pits, resurrect the NCB and NUM and create an AI powered holographic Scargil
Vote Tory and support our glorious 5year plan for national coal power and shiny biceps
And then Labour would attack them for stealing their previous stance when they elected Corbyn as leader...?
"High taxation and low productivity is what this government is doing."
Just like the Conservative one of the last fifteen years? At least Starmer does mean well, he's identified a series of priority challenges, and his cabinet are trying. And that's more than any of the circa 1,000 different ministerial appointments under Cameron/May/Johnson/Truss/Sunak (and we could start the list with Brown, who was similarly inept, if less venal).
"The UK can produce our own coke, but the government won't let it"
Here we get into the problem of exporting our carbon. UK made steel would probably be less carbon intensive than say Polish or Chinese steel. BUT as part of the carbon reduction we can't allow that to be released within our territorial air volume.
Here we get into the problem of exporting our carbon. UK made steel would probably be less carbon intensive than say Polish or Chinese steel. BUT as part of the carbon reduction we can't allow that to be released within our territorial air volume.
But that's why Net Zero is just nuts, and Scope regulations and accounting requirements are just a waste of time & resources. So we need 1t coke to make steel. We can import that, and have to account for carbon emissions along the whole journey. Or we dig it up here and the journey is shorter. Assuming equally efficient mining, the emissions costs per tonne are going to be the same wherever it's mined. So say, shipping coke from Australia's going to have a carbon footprint greater than digging it up in the North East. Or we let China import Coke from Australia, smelt steel, ship it to the UK and we can pretend that's Green. Or just troughers make money flogging carbon credits to cover the whole journey. Air volume doesn't really matter because neither CO2 nor 'global warming' respects lines drawn on a map.
Worse, the datacentres have their own OCGTs and/or Diesel (which are afaik not counted in the overall generation reporting). We may end up in a situation where datacentres act as a "flexible load" by falling back to local gas generation when the grid is short on renewable power.
The trouble with that is, datacentres being so huge, have a very destabilising effect on local distribution networks - they trip over to backup generation at the slightest sniff of a voltage dip or spike, and they do it en-masse, which can cause localised blackouts.
On top of that, they are constant-power loads, which means that if the voltage dips slightly and they stay on the grid, their current draw rises by the same proportion. That would also be bad news for distribution network operators, and it's a pet theory of mine that the Heathrow debacle may have been caused/contributed to by the concentration of datacentres in West London. (a rapidly changing localised load puts a strain on Automatic Voltage Regulation, whereby a control system at the substation moves a tap on an autotransformer to keep the voltage stable, but too much movement of that tapchanger causes arcs which can contaminate the insulating oil and prematurely age the transformer, leading to an explosion if the insulation breaks down completely)
Very much more CCGT generation is essential, there is nothing sad about it.
Longer term is very much more nuclear, but we must start now and immediately cease building renewables
Renewables are not practically or technically able to power a grid. They only work because of full time support from gas generation, i.e. two systems doing one job.
It is no wonder our electricity is so expensive
You need to do a LOT more reading on the makeup of UK end-user energy prices. Gas does often set the WHOLESALE price, but that's increasingly irrelevant to the end user user prices, and the "must run" status of renewables mean that you're paying whatever subsidy government agreed for those..
It is worth considering why Germany has industrial energy prices less than half of the UK, when it is similarly reliant upon gas in its wholesale electricity market.
Militwit will probably tell them to pray harder to the sky gods to fart in their general direction. Energy generation isnt his priority, green madness is. Energy generation will only become the priority when it is so politically damaging to carry on pursuing ideology over reality.
Yep. So-
In a recent report, it noted that "UK industrial electricity prices at 25.85p/kWh are the highest of the 28 countries covered by the IEA report...
...We asked Ed Miliband's office, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) what measures, if any, it intended to take to alleviate this, but we have yet to receive a response.
And-
Another area of concern will be promoting sustainability and the use of renewable energy solutions.
Millibrain has never been good at cause & effect, and DESNeeZ got a CEO from the 'renewables' lobby and a mission change to promote 'renewables' rather than reduce costs and improve energy security. But a modest proposal would be to build a 'renewable' pilot datacentre. It'll be fine-
https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind
minimum: 0.412 GW maximum: 13.85 GW average: 6.552 GW
An 'AI' datacentre should be smart enough to turn off power to enough racks when the wind drops. I mean it's not like they really need to operate at full power, 24x7x365. Then again, both the general public and industry are starting to realise that Millibrain's energy policy is why energy costs are so high, why 'Net Zero' really means shrinking the UK economy to 1990 levels, and reducing energy prices to 1990 levels would be rather more beneficial.
Plus is a bit of bubble-on-bubble thinking, with the combination of an AI bubble meeting the 'renewables' bubble leading to both bursting.
(with perhaps a touch of sarcasm regarding how the Militwittish one plans on handling this one...)
Nope - we already know how, if you'd paid attention.
Remember this big push for EV's? They come with this neat little feature where you plug them in and they act like battery storage.
That's how the datacentres get power: People plugging their mobile battery storage into the grid. (You thought you were charging your EV? Nope, you're supplying power to the grid. I know... you only plug in your EV when it needs charge, but if it's plugged in and partly charged when the Grid decides it needs the power back...).
(and that's the end of the light sarcasm response).
The other way is something the government was pushing a while back: Making Datacentres a priority for power, combined with plans on rolling brownouts when demand exceeds supply. Allegedly datacentres should also be at least partly self-powering via wind and solar onsite, but I've lost track as to how far that's got.
Allegedly datacentres should also be at least partly self-powering via wind and solar onsite, but I've lost track as to how far that's got
Artists impressions, and accountants running cost vs subsidy calculations probably. But would be the usual problem with solar that could be guesstimated based on roof area and W/m^2 from panels plonked on it. And then what to do for power overnight when heating, cooking, vehicle charging etc etc would increase demand on the grid.
Batteries. They are going to be a big thing. Some houses are already using them to store electricity produced when demand is low.
Solar on a rooftop is, of course, not the whole answer, but every kilowatt produced is less gas burned to power the grid. The direction of travel is clear: less gas is used in UK power stations every year.
Solar output is pitiful and unreliable in the UK, thanks to our location on the globe and our climate, and worse still the timing of its availability is completely mismatched with our largest energy demand. Batteries are only a very partial answer, because they are expensive, they need to be managed, they consume about 10% of the energy they store. If they're cycled frequently then things are OK, trying to store for long periods of time results in appalling asset utilisation.
As things stand, solar does reduce gas use, but it does so by being subsidised, and destabilising the grid, requiring the gas plant to power down, then we have to pay gas plant owners more for despatchable capacity, and the efficiency of the gas plant is reduced due to cycling up and down.
There's places in the world where solar is an obvious technology that's extremely well suited to both climate and demand. Just not at 51 degrees north in mostly grey and soggy Britain.
Solar generation in the UK during the last few sunny weeks was astonishingly high, hitting some 11GW at one point. Middle of the day obviously.
What I fail to understand though is how its seasonality (daily or annually) is in the slightest bit useful to solving the overall supply situation as it doesn't even vaguely align with peak demand.
It seems like the industry is already cannibalising itself.
"It seems like the industry is already cannibalising itself."
As a former industry insider, I think you've very neatly encapsulated the net result of the mix of markets and government policy mandates. In terms of cost per MWh, there's actually little to choose between renewables and nuclear, so logic would dictate that we should have not wasted the circa £300bn* so far frittered on renewables and spent that on despatchable nuclear power. Indeed, on a sequential investment basis that would have bought at least ten 3.2 GW EPRs, which yesterday would have all but covered ALL UK electricity demand and allowed us to have no CCGT, no pretend-green biomass, etc.
* https://www.gov.uk/government/news/over-1-billion-budget-for-renewable-energy-auction
And that doesn't include distribution or interconnector spending, which I guess will add another £50bn.
UK government were talking about making datacentres (and hence AI) a higher priority to such things as heating and transport. So if that's how it goes, we're not looking at finding leftover energy for AI, but for heating homes and powering vehicles.
Off-grid home power production is looking really attractive now. On grid (the normal installs of solar/wind with batteries) runs the risk of your home storage being tapped when you actually need the power yourself, leaving you short.
"On grid (the normal installs of solar/wind with batteries) runs the risk of your home storage being tapped when you actually need the power yourself, leaving you short."
Home storage involvement in grid response would probably be up to you (unless you've contracted an energy or equipment supplier to manage it for you). However, UK government policy already requires all EV purpose-made charging points to be smart grid compatible, and that's because they intend to use EV batteries to balance the grid, and it's unlikely that the hoi-polloi will be able to opt out. NESO's future scenarios see vehicle to grid offering as much as 65 GW of capacity by 2050, although that's clearly going to vary according to time of day, battery capacity and the many other factors.
I reckon huge developments like the Botley West solar farm in Oxfordshire will be rushed through and sod the consequences. Thought it was for houses? Nah mate, data centres. Then we have projects like the massive reservoir near Abingdon.
Earmarked as a fresh water supply for the Home Counties it’s also going to be convenient for data farms.
Everything is going according to plan in the UK, big business building infrastructure for … big business.
Sod the nimbys
> Thought it was for houses? Nah mate, data centres.
No doubt they will still quote 1GW(peak sun) as powering "one million homes", rather than 1 million scams and fake cat-videos per second..
And no doubt with the Trump trade-war, we will see even more dumping of cheap panels and naff inverters (but no cheap grid transformers, natch)
Nothing wrong with a bit of solar, but we can have too much of it (because it is so intermittent), and its place is on rooftops, car-parks, arid deserts, and maybe by the sides of the odd motorway, NOT on farmland
"Everything is going according to plan in the UK, big business building infrastructure for … big business."
Essentially renewables are being built for the benefit of the financial services sector. It's a risk free investment. Specifically, there's no price risk because they have a generous strike price guaranteed through the Low Carbon Contracts Company. There's no inflation risk, despite all the costs being upfront, LCCC contracts are index linked, so they get paid more each year even though the asset value on the balance sheet is declining. There's no customer default risk as that's on big energy suppliers, and if a supplier is at risk they have to post collateral to trade in the wholesale market. There's no demand risk because of the policy intent to electrify everything. There's no construction risk as that's all stapled onto the developer and equipment suppliers. There's no loss of load risk because the grid still have to pay if they can't take the electricity.
So basically renewables are a licence for banks to print more and more money, and being the financial services sector they'll be taking the income streams, packaging them up and selling low "guaranteed return" investments to pension funds, and keeping a stub of equity plus a much bigger share of the profits for themselves.
Utter fucking madness to finance energy system investments in this way, all designed by the Tories, but something that the current government think is marvellous.
How much? For a very large industrial electricity consumer, UK electricity prices incl taxes are 151.9% higher than the median of the EU's larger 14 members plus the UK. And that's according to the UK government's own data, as per DESNZ QEP dataset, table 5.4.4.
In France the average industrial energy price incl tax was 6.32 p/kWh, in Germany 11.92, and here in Blighty our politicians have managed to get it up to 23.47 p/kWh.
The country is not going to have the infrastructure or energy supply for future needs. The government only pretends to care. We will pay more and more and 'they' will get richer. We will pay more for everything because all modern life depends on energy. You will travel less and less because it will be so expensive but some will use private jets and go wherever they want. CO2 is not killing the planet - plants adore it and convert it to O2 for us. CO2 is about 0.04% of the atmosphere and between 3-30% from us, it's argued as you can imagine. After that UK produces hardly anything while China, India and US pump out the VAST majority of CO2. UK is < 1%. So being generous to Ed Milliband the ** UK contributes 0.00012% of atmosphere as CO2 ** Plant food, the gas of life. CO2 can and has been higher. It was at a low point, near commencement of plant death, which way would it go? If it went lower we would be dying of starvation now.
So ask yourselves, why would a UK government want to do so much damage to us for nothing?
It is insanity.
Several tin foil hats being worn by this one.
Struggling to get through the lack of punctuation and coherent sentence structure, but I believe it’s full of stale regurgitated FUD.
The lack of even a basic understanding of why co2 is a greenhouse gas is staggering in its blatant ignorance.
All the data is at your fingertips but you’d rather repeat factually incorrect crap.
Funny you should say that....
The UK has 1200 farms that meet the US defn of a "Mega-farm." That are all livestock and poultry which means at least a hectare of roof area (and probably considerably more) and also slurry for some very substantial anaerobic digesters.
The roof area combined could be conservatively enough for 1GW of additional leccy production (while the sun shine). Minimal planning permission requirements as well. I'm not sure what the gas volume would be but I'd expect it equally substantial. Or capable of being turned into electricity on both a sustainable and dispatchable* basis.
Which could be online before the end of this Parliament.
Just a thought.
*The #1 failing of most renewable energy systems. Geothermal is potentially 24/7/365 as are solar power sats, while tidal is not, but is predictable
Maybe I missed it but there seems to be nothing in there to power the milk floats that everyone is supposedly buying. There have been numerous reports suggesting there is not enough power for that but now we are ignoring that in favour of not enough power for AI?
I wonder how much these companies would scream if they had to build their own power station for each datacentre they stand up?
As somebody who a few years back was involved in this debate, working for a major energy supplier, I can assure you that there's no vision or proper system planning. It's just a panicky roll out of subsidised wind and solar that don't add sufficient net output to help with either baseload or peak demand scenarios, and then the policies of government are to electrify both transport and heating.
If you want to depress yourself, search up and read NESO's Future Energy Scenarios 2024.
Lots of grand ideas about how we might achieve net zero, little thought for practicality or cost. So current electricity demand is 285 TWh per year. By 2050 they predict around 840 TWh. The whole net zero madness hasn't even yet started, but government are fully committed to it. As one example, we've now got 18GW of solar capacity (operating at a miserable 9% annual capacity factor) in FES they're proposing to build out to 70-90GW. You remember grass? You won't be seeing so much of it in the future. Nuclear would make a lot of sense, and they do predict growth - but from the current 7 GW of capacity to (a mid point) of around 15 GW.
So where any sane person would say either to defer the net zero targets and come up with a realistic costed plan and date, or to plan for a cookie cutter approach to nuclear to meet say 80% of peak demand*, we're just going to throw more and more money at under-performing renewables and then wonder why we end up with an expensive and unreliable mess. As the article notes, we ALREADY have the most expensive electricity in the world, and government policy is committed to making it a LOT more expensive.
pitiful efforts so far by Matt Cliffard. IT's answer to peak ALan Partridge.
It's the same here. Few, if any, have any faith in AI simply because Western culture has eaten itself. The UK and the USA are miles behind the Chinese - I know as I sell all my stuff to them as trying to get anything out of Westerners is a pain wotrth avoiding. All talk of bubbles bursting, blah, blah.
The whole Western culutaural view is self-destruction and any signs of greatness is smothered by the masses. it's over boys and that one gril who reads this.
We blew it when Demis got on his kness to Google.
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The wholesale price per unit is set by the price of the most expensive supplier needed to supply the last fraction of demand in any given 1/2 hour period.
Sooo.
Cheap suppliers IE renewables can bid a low price ensuring their power gets picked. They'll make a profit.
But if demand climbs more and more expensive bids will be accepted until all the demand is fulfilled. Up to the CCGT units.
And all the electricity bought by the network will be paid for at that price. Which is a very sweet deal for the suppliers.
I wonder if you can see how a generator with a mix of CCGT, renewables and fairly competent forecasting staff could make a very nice profit on the deal?
They have no incentive to phase out CCGT and meanwhile the UK will continue to have the most expensive electricity in the world.
I remember a cartoon many years ago about a ship sinking, the bows are under the water, and there are people on the stern saying "My end's ok"
It would be very helpful for all parties is someone we trusted did the sums.
Eg If we import steel - what does it really cost in energy (and pollution) terms. What does it cost if we do it within the UK. Don't say we import from China - so our costs are 0!
What is the true cost of windfarms - bearing in mind we need to fix the infrastructure to take the power.
If we import pellets from Canada - what is the true cost. If you cut a tree down and plant another - it will not be carbon neutral for 100 years, so if you cut one tree down, you need to plant 1000 trees now.
Electric cars - what is the (carbon/electrical) cost of creating the batteries- and processing them at end of life.
We couldn’t build HS2
We couldn’t build the upgrade to the A1
I heard on the radio that the DVLA test booking system will take 5 years to upgrade
How shit has the UK become, unreal
Build data centres for AI
I will wait for rainbow popping unicorn to turn up first
The UK faces a unique and ironic challenge: it has some of the most expensive energy costs in the world, yet it also aspires to be a global AI superpower, lead in sustainability, rely on renewable energy, and is legally committed to achieving net zero. These ambitions are all commendable — but together, they form a perfect storm of conflicting pressures.
I would love to see the UK thrive in AI and become a magnet for global investment. But the current situation feels a bit like watching a powerlifter who’s training for the Olympics, while also preparing to run an ultramarathon, and somehow trying to land a modelling contract on the side.
It’s inspiring, yes — but also a little comedic, because each goal pulls in a different direction. Success in one area could easily come at the cost of another, unless we find a way to balance these competing priorities with realism and strategic clarity.
