50 GW of datacenter demand queues up for UK grid access

About 140 datacenters are in the queue to be connected to Britain's power grid, and their combined energy requirements are estimated to be more than the current peak electricity use for the entire country. Ofgem, the energy regulator for England, Scotland, and Wales, recently published a call for input on Demand Connections …

[Paul Herber]

50GW?

50GW? That's almost an armful !

[hoola]

Re: 50GW?

It is more than doubling demand for UK power. Putting it in that perspective makes you realise just what the insanity of these datacentres is. There never going to be that much benefit, it is just madness.

Presumably UK planing is a soft touch.

https://gridwatch.co.uk/

[Colin Miller]

UK Grid visualization tools

Templar Gridwatch (gridwatch.templar.co.uk) and IAmKate's National Grid live (grid.iamkate.com) are different grid visualization tools, based on the same data. They all have their different strengths and weaknesses.

[Boothy]

Re: UK Grid visualization tools

Also https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live

[David Hicklin]

Re: 50GW?

They need to reverse the decommissioning of the Ratcliff on Soar coal power station pronto then - at least the cooling towers are still standing and the rail lines for coal deliveries are in place.

Or this AI bubble can burst even quicker - events in the middle east might even give it a prod or poke..

[Lee D]

"You want it? You pay for it. Full costs of the necessary power generation plants, including generation, transport, construction, integration, a suitable, authorised location, and decommissioning."

"Oh, and by the way, we're going to be putting massive clauses in your use of our fast-track programme that mean you have to dial down your usage over time, and you must prove and demonstrate continued investment in becoming self-sufficient power-wise throughout the entire term of your connection."

"Oh, and you get absolutely no rate discount and have to pay what everyone else pays per KWh"

Problem solved.

Couple of pages of A4.

Sign here.

[DLYONS]

Sadly .....

you mean UK taxpayer pays for it, install, power and everything, and it turns in to a car crash of us all. or am i being sinical.

[Lon24]

Re: Sadly .....

Getting money upfront for building out the generation and grid reconfigurations may be the easy bit - as long as you cash the cheques upfront too before the banks break.

The harder bit is how to deliver. Already a significant part of generation is imported by cable. from France, Benelux & Norway. They will have their own AI demands to satisfy so that could disappear too. Building nuclear would take decades, building offshore wind needs a very different grid plus backup. Solar too needs backup. The grid is also having to cope with the switch from ICE to EV in transport. Yep, the only answer is appears to be gas. It's quick and will people think about the costs in bills and climate change when chatting with their friendly bot?

I really can't see a way out of this chaos for us or the rest of the developed world. Time to get into (Ant)artic real estate >:-(

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Sadly .....

Yes, and equipment and the engineers required to install it is at a premium – you thought CPUs and memory were getting expensive.

[retiredFool]

Re: Sadly .....

I think even gas may be hitting a wall. Turbines on back order and at some point even gas might start getting hard to find adequate supplies. LNG tankers/loading docks are also back ordered I think. And all of this stuff (wind/solar/gas/smr...) all take time to build and the ai guys want it all yesterday.

[Strangelove]

Re: Sadly .....

Gas won't work either if every other country also wants it, and we must assume the data madness is there too!! Now our own gas in the north sea has been cheerfully declining since the early 2000s, and we are now competing with the rest off the planet for imports, as we collectively run the known reserves flat on a time-scale of decades.

Halving that timescale seems particularly stupid, and that is before we consider the environmental impacts, that will lead to massive migration problems, massive compared to the politically motivated migration we have now that is.

The whole thing is fantastic, in a bad way.

[VoiceOfTruth]

Re: Sadly .....

You are not being cynical.

Leave it to the market, the Tory mantra, really means the tax payer socialises the costs and a few chosen ones get the profits.

[elsergiovolador]

How about you try this Wagyu beef first and then wash it down with this fine wine.

[Edward Ashford]

Sounds like Guinness Peat all over again.

Sadly I fear you are just linking the economy very forcefully to an AI bubble burst.

A national strategy like "build 20% more than current maximum demand" might provide a softer fall.

Building Control and council planning services can already tell who is pie in sky and who is pouring founds. Just needs joined up.

[Anonymous Coward]

lol

[gryphon]

"developers try to reserve power for projects that may never be built"

As Lee D said.

At the very least lodge a bond to cover 5-10 years of their estimated power consumption so if they end up ditching the project the power companies (or more likely the taxpayer aren't on the hook for it), a bit like landfill or mining restoration bonds to allow reverting sites to nature which avoids the companies pinky promise to do but then going mysteriously bankrupt at the last minute.

No doubt the developers can insure or hedge themselves for it.

[Steve Foster]

Link to Planning Permission?

Make it so that any project that doesn't yet have PP (or maybe just at least applied for PP) is automatically disqualified from being added to the connection queue.

[Richard 12]

Re: Link to Planning Permission?

The NPPF is currently out for comment, so contact your local councillors ASAP.

Not much time left, though

[Chris Fox]

Re: Link to Planning Permission?

Actually, better to respond to the UK central gov's consultation directly rather than lobby local councillors, whose councils may have their own ideas about how, or whether, to respond.

FWIW, here's a link with CPRE's suggestions on how to respond:

https://www.cpre.org.uk/action/national-planning-policy-framework-respond-to-the-consultation/

[Roland6]

Re: Link to Planning Permission?

Simple solution put a mandatory hold on all datacentre planning applications for 3 years - likewise on their associated grid connects.

We can expect the AI bubble to have burst within the next year or so, so after 3 years only those applications with a real business need will still have legs…

[Duncan Macdonald]

Then add another huge chunk for all vehicles being electric

The datacenter demand is the easiest to deal with - just deny planning permission for all datacenters that need more than 10MW. Datacenters do not add a significent number of jobs once the construction phase is over so there is very little reason for the UK want them.

Dealing with the "Green" demand that all internal combustion vehicles are removed from the roads is going to require far more added electricity generation and distribution infrastructure.

Well over 20GW of additional generation would be needed to provide the energy for the vehicles. (If the load was absolutely uniform throughout the year then 12GW would just suffice. However as the demand varies over the course of every day (home charging can only take place when the vehicle is at home) the demand will be very non-uniform.)

Add to that the requirement for most urban roads in the UK needing to be dug up to install higher capacity electric cables along with replacing most urban distribution transformers with higher capacity ones to actually feed the power to homes to allow them to charge the vehicles. (For those people who say that fast chargers (eg at supermarkets) should be used, they cost far more (50-90 p/kWh) than domestic electricity (under 25p/kWh)).

Icon for the "Green" all electric vehicle idea ==============>

[Like a badger]

Re: Then add another huge chunk for all vehicles being electric

Electrification of road vehicles is the least of our concerns, compared to the plans to replace all gas heating by heat pumps. In terms of resource input, it will appear that road fuels dwarf space heating demand, but that's largely down to the poor efficiency of ICE vehicles. The particular problem with electrifying heating is that demand is hugely seasonal, so an annual doubling implies a winter peak multiplier that's 4-8x.

According to NESO Future Energy Scenarios, domestic electricity demand will double by 2050. If they plan to add in the same again of AI DCs in a shorter timescale...well, it's all bollocks.

[Tron]

Re: Then add another huge chunk for all vehicles being electric

Locally, all of our roads are already being dug up, presumably for those fatter cables.

Consider this: Make the AI companies pay everything up front, no refunds. After the AI bubble pops, we will have the(ir) cash to build the EV power generation.

[twelvebore]

Re: Then add another huge chunk for all vehicles being electric

Electric vehicles and non-polluting home heating solutions are a net positive and worth investing in as a nation. For sure it will cost money now, but that is a) money that should have been invested years ago, and b) money that is well invested now.

Artificial "intelligence" is toxic bullshit and anyone on this website should know that the current balance of useful-stuff-per-kWh is totally off the scale. Which bit of "we need more power than your country has to produce fake nudes vids for teens" doesn't ring alarm bells?

[Evil Scot]

Re: Then add another huge chunk for all vehicles being electric

I take it you only take cold showers.

Home charging is 7.2kWh Electric showers 8kWh+.

Icon for your research ability

[David Hicklin]

Re: Then add another huge chunk for all vehicles being electric

> Home charging is 7.2kWh Electric showers 8kWh+.

But you don't stand all night under a running shower.

[paluster]

excess or common sense.

So these idiots want to use the same amount of power as the peak winter usage for the entire country on a regular basis.

"Np" seems the most sensible answer. Or in more detail "come back when you dont need the same amount of power as a medium size city just to run plus half the water in the local reservoir to avoid bursting into flames"

If enough countries did that then the AI megacorps would be screaming at the likes of Nvidia to do their job properly and if that didnt work they might actually sit down and write the code for their little toys more efficently.

[alain williams]

Re: excess or common sense.

So these idiots want to use the same amount of power as the peak winter usage for the entire country on a regular basis.

It should be mandated that these data centres should be located such that the excess heat can be put into heating for homes in winter rather than useless boiling of water and creating clouds.

[Like a badger]

Re: excess or common sense.

Seasonality of heating demand means that either the DC provides baseload heat, and the majority of annual heat demand is then met from some other peaking heat source, or network is sized to meet most of the seasonal space heating peak, but is then hugely underused for most of the year (and the DC would need to bleed off excess heat in the normal way).

Space heating demand is a very difficult load to meet efficiently. For illustrative purposes, an average domestic property would consume around 250 kWh of gas for water and space heating in a summer month, and in the peak winter month (that could be any or all of Nov-Feb) would use over 2000 kWh.

[Richard 12]

Re: excess or common sense.

Really, leisure centre swimming pools are the only sane user of datacentre waste heat.

Anything else is too seasonal.

[Like a badger]

Re: excess or common sense.

Not even those. Swimming pool heat demand will be related to the temperature differential between the really warm bit and the outside air. Insulation helps, but how well insulated do most swimming pools look to you? So winter energy use is still far higher than summer.

[BadRobotics]

Re: excess or common sense.

Pump it deep underground and let geothermals raise the temperature suffient to run turbines.

[retiredFool]

Re: excess or common sense.

What is really crazy to me is the now shortage of memory is causing people to start saying we need to optimize apps for using less memory (and probably as a result power).

No one is suggesting AI needs to start getting more efficient. And it is the thing devouring all the chips, power, water...

[nbc]

Frack

baby, frack.

[Like a badger]

Re: Frack

How does that help? This isn't about the availability of energy, which can be bought (relatively) cheaply as LNG, but a problem that the UK has no excess of power generation, a grid that isn't built with much spare capacity, and building new power lines or generation (or anything) in the UK has been made as slow, costly and difficult as possible by successive governments.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Frack

> building new power lines

And NIMBY's

[Long John Silver]

Perhaps sense can prevail

Behind the scenes, discussions are underway among Labour MPs concerning who should be Mr Starmer's replacement.

If somebody sensible assumes the mantle, UK government 'AI' mania will be halted.

[Duncan Macdonald]

Re: Perhaps sense can prevail - Not likely

The UK has had ONE useful politician in the last 100 years. Winston Churchill was a useful figurehead in WW2.

As for the rest - if someone did the Guy Fawkes job properly, the main public regret would be for the Big Ben clock.

Icon for my opinion of politicians ============>

[Like a badger]

Re: Perhaps sense can prevail - Not likely

the main public regret would be for the Big Ben clock

Probably, but I'd just like to register the view that the HoP are the most appalling ugly, ostentatious mock gothic monstrosity, and I'd happily see it gone with all it's regular hangers-on inside.

[paluster]

Re: Perhaps sense can prevail - Not likely

And I'd just like to point out that Big Ben isnt the clock or the tower, it's the bell

[Will Godfrey]

Re: Perhaps sense can prevail - Not likely

... and it's already cracked.

[Anonymous Coward]

More than all our homes use ?

You pay for twice as much as you use.

The extra goes into paying for homel use - NOT the shareholders !

Simples

[Julz]

Just

Madness.

[Will Godfrey]

Re: Just

Somewhere in the bible there's a bit that says:

"Those god intend to destroy, he first drives insane."

Looks like we've reached the 'insane' bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

this ai datacentre thing will fizzle out. as I write, UK electricity demand is currently 34.7 GW. 20% of this is being imported right now from the continent. To suggest that an additional 50 GW can be hooked up to power these datacentres is, as Julz says above, Madness! Oh, and how's Hinkley coming along? :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Uk electricity costs are still about double what they were 5-6years ago and a recently announced 7% drop in the price cap for Britain is the first reduction in a long time. This government had long term planning for more affordable electricity as a key policy promise.

All that to say socialising the very significant costs to accommodate data centre consumption of this magnitude will not be accepted by the electorate and the government knows this.

[David Hicklin]

> recently announced 7% drop in the price cap for Britain

Sadly this will be wiped out in short order by events in the Middle East - Gas already up 25%

[BadRobotics]

Geothermal uplifting

Pump all that waste hot water underground, let geothermals raise the temperature and run turbines to produce electricity. They are doing this in Cornwall at a lithium mine.

[mark l 2]

I fail to see why we need AI data centres in the UK anyway, they hardly create any jobs or bring in revenue for the local economy. Deny all planning permission and let these US AI companies waste resources to build them in America. I mean is anyone going to notice the difference if Grok/Gemeni/ChatGPT etc takes an extra 100ms delay in generating its slop output cos it has to do it over a transatlantic link rather connecting to a data centre locally?

[paluster]

You have a point. As these will probably all be run by American companies they will all be subject to the CLOUD Act so there are np real benefits to hosting them in the UK

[s. pam]

BaconEd Millibrain to their rescue

Let Mr. Nut Zero build them power, funded by and solely for them then!

Immediately followed 0.2s after he is sacked from his job for non-delivery of a £300 savings for every UK household!