Britain's AI datacenter plans face energy, planning, investment challenges Significant hurdles stand in the way of the UK government's push to become a global AI superpower, including energy constraints, planning difficulties and the datacenter investment required for it all. high voltage illustration OK great, UK is building loads of AI datacenters. How are we going to power that? READ MORE …
>> including energy constraints.
That should read energy costs, as you later mention here:
>> the UK having some of the most expensive energy prices in the world
Tories and Labour alike are to blame. We have not had an energy policy for decades. Just leave something which really is essential to everyday life to the market. We can see where that has got us.
The government (or what passes for governing in the UK) can remove other hurdles, but that won't help. Those hurdles can be removed in other countries too. Then it's back to the cost of energy part of the equation.
But there are no energy constraints !
If you want to build a datacentre then you need to include the cost of purchasing the land and building the (nuclear) power station.
The issue is we have become accustomed to the idea that paying for the building of infrastructure needed by business is the responsibility of the public purse and not the business investors. See exactly the same thing with EV's, there is no real reason why government should be funding the provision of a charging network (that business will profit from), the governments role should be to set the parameters and Standards and let "the market" build.
Not so!
If you read this week's Private Eye (p38) apparently Teesworks Ltd (the dodgy freeport run by Chris Musgrave and Martin Corney) bought a "private wire" electrical distribution network, including 20 substations, for er, £10.91 - 55p per substation - from publicly-owned South Tees Development Corporation, thanks to their mate Lord (Ben) Houchen
They now plan to locate datacentres on the site. And because it is a freeport, it would be exempt from various taxes and possibly data protection regulations.
So it just goes to show that if you have the right (political) connections then you can get all the (electrical) connections you need, paying only pennies for infrastructure worth tens of millions of pounds. It's corruption to the core of government. Another stinking Tory legacy that so-called Labour are happy to continue..
There would be so constraints if they put them outside of Londonahire or North of the Cambridge/Oxford line.
Plenty of (green)Electricity and water on Shap or in Scotland.
—
For those whinging about latency … your Production AWS is almost certainly in AWS-Europe-West-1, Dublin..
I would read it as the Energy Constraints are the infrastructure changes needed as the proposals for these data centres seem to be focused on greenbelt land, not brown belt.
We have excess capacity in the grid. However, the Government are rather stupid: They keep allocating that extra capacity to different things, from EV's to Heat pumps, and now to AI datacentres. That excess can't support all of those things. Hell, it can't even support ONE of those things. But the Government, being idiots, haven't a clue (or simply don't care), hence their idea that they'll just get people to shut things off so what capacity we have got goes to what the Government can make the most money from (or pay them the biggest 'donations').
Meanwhile the infrastructure needs updating and upgrading and there's not enough investment into that: And that NEEDED to be upgraded FIRST. But like I said: Government are idiots.
The excess needs a better strategy to soak up overnight and level the utilisation profile.
- pumped storage hydro
- better home battery subsidy
- wholesale reintroduction of Economy 7 at say 20% discount to the day rate to more significantly drive usage behaviour
- more free weekend days
Fact check ..
> - pumped storage hydro
We have two and are building two more and they're needed for short term dispatch of power. If you wanted pumped storage to tide us over the several days at a time when it's cloudy and the wind doesn't blow, you'd need crazy numbers of pumped storage (200+ ?) and there ain't enough suitable geography for even a tiny fraction of that.
> - better home battery subsidy
Forget it. Batteries are good for a few hours, not the several days that are needed.
> - wholesale reintroduction of Economy 7 at say 20% discount to the day rate to more significantly drive usage behaviour
Er, it's already around 50% discounted.
Close to me is the former Chapelcross Magnox Nuclear Station.
Apart from the (slowly being deconstructed) reactor hall buildings the rest of the site was long cleared and is begging for something there - whether a new full sized Nuclear Power Station, a Modular or Data centre campus.
Power interconnects already there, cooling water and eager workers.
… oh SNP no Nuclear Power Stations ….
We don't really want wind farms and solar farms being connected to the grid in the way grid connections are currently being configured - Spain's recent outage should be a wake up call to the stupidity of direct grid connections. Wind and Solar farm operators need to put a bank of batteries between turbines/panels and the grid that are capable of supplying more than 1 hour of electricity (ie. more than the 30min windows the grid works in and sufficiently long to permit the spin up/down of slower "base load" generators).
Google set up its "Asia Data Center" in Changhua decades ago.
Nvidia and countless foreign companies are also rushing to Taiwan to set up high-energy AI data centers.
They all come for the ridiculously low electricity prices provided by the public power company Taipower.
Taipower suffers huge losses every year and waits for subsidies from the Taiwanese people.
Minister of Economic Affairs Kuo Chih-hui and his ilk are proud of bringing in foreign chaebols to plunder the Taiwanese people.
To imagine and start thinking that either popular or unpopular centralised human government are in any way necessary for AI to flourish and spread its compounding news and confounding views which so easily render and expose the future wishful thinking of competing and opposing nations as a vast catalogue of monumentally catastrophic and increasingly obvious inevitably self-destructive tissue of lies, has y'all blissfully unaware of the fundamentally radical situation for publishing you are being hopelessly led and be fated to constantly struggle to survive and prosper in.
And as for ....Significant hurdles stand in the way of the UK government's push to become a global AI superpower, .. ....... that sure be some heavy shit those UK government pushers be smoking ...... Premium A1 Psychosis Grade ..... for it just aint gonna happen for real ever, is it. Be honest now. Don’t fool yourself and have others realise you be mentally ill and more than just a touch crazy too.
Welcome back AMFM - not seen you around for a while. .... Will Godfrey
Cheers, and ditto, Will G. Very much the same could be said of your good self.
At times in some very strange situations and surreal spaces can IT be refreshingly busy and unusually engaging ..... but one is never ever too far away to reward multiple new destinations with stealthy favoured returns to any securely tried and fail-safe tested launch pad/peer reviewed publication.
Question [from Doctor Syntax].......We know, but who's going to tell them?
Answer ...... A GODlike [Global Operating Device like] Superpowerful AI easily does that, but do crass ignorant and arrogant fools that be as blunt useless tools in their ivory towers listen and take heed of what is in store for them whenever deaf, dumb and blind to the changed and changing worlds around them that surround them ‽ .
Methinks then they be ripe ready for prime executive extermination.
The UK doesn't have enough spare water, energy or labour for any of this, and everything here is far too expensive. Labour aren't competent enough to be in power for more than one term, if they survive that, and any planning/deals with them will end when they go. Brexit Britain is not a wise choice to build stuff in. With the gaps on the supermarket shelves, failing services, absence of labour across multiple sectors, political instability and inflation, it is way too third world.
Nuclear power plants take too long and cost too much. The UK doesn't have spare ones like the US and Japan. If you really do want to build datacentres here, you could wait until Reform get in and abolish pretty much all regulation/green targets. But even then, the place will just go to hell faster, and it won't be somewhere you would be out of choice.
Companies may initially sign up though. British governments have a long history of handing over public money for political reasons and then walking away, getting nothing in return. Migrants to Rwanda etc. So some will have a go at bagging a sack of cash from a desperate, talentless political regime, with no strings attached, and then walking away with it.
Those meetings they wouldn't tell you about. How much were those individuals with vested interests paid simply to be there?
