There are 100GW of datacentre projects in the queue to connect to the National Grid, said Stuart Okin, the director of cyber regulation and AI at Ofgem. Photograph: Arctic-Images/Getty ImagesThere are 100GW of datacentre projects in the queue to connect to the National Grid, said Stuart Okin, the director of cyber regulation and AI at Ofgem. Photograph: Arctic-Images/Getty ImagesMore than 100 UK datacentres plan to burn gas to generate electricityRequests for gas connections by operators amount to more than 15 terawatt hours per year, endangering climate targets
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.
Lincolnshire council approves AI datacentre despite emissions warningsRead moreSilvia Simon, the head of research at Future Energy Networks, which represents the UK’s natural gas suppliers, said the group had received “more than 100” requests for gas connections from datacentre operators in the past two years.
These requests amounted to more than 15 terawatt hours of energy each year, she said: enough to power London for roughly four and a half months.
“Gas networks are seeing a lot of interest from datacentre developers looking to secure a gas connection,” she said. “Not just for resilience, but for primary supply. So this is already an indication that they’re really struggling to get through to the electricity networks.”
Governments and big tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars into a frenzied and ambitious AI programme.
In the US, many of these projects rely on gas-fired generation. In Tennessee, activists have battled Elon Musk’s xAI for illegally running tens of methane-powered generators, risking the health of the surrounding community.
Meanwhile, 11 US datacentres built to serve Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and xAI reportedly will emit more carbon than the country of Morocco. These emissions will come from off-grid gas generators built by the datacentre developers themselves.
Now the same thing could happen in Britain. An energy consultant who had worked for years in the sector said that over the past year, he had seen a growing number of datacentre projects planning to rely on gas power. This was not a temporary backstop.
“Using gas networks was previously avoided due to carbon, permitting, and land-take impacts, and has typically only been considered as a temporary fix,” he said.
US tech firms successfully lobbied EU to keep datacentre emissions secretRead moreBut developers are now increasingly turning to fossil fuels, “in some cases requesting over 100MW of gas power on a permanent basis”.
Julian Leslie, the director of strategic planning at the UK’s National Energy System Operator (Neso), said this gas buildout could complicate Britain’s climate goals.
“The target was to get less than 5% of unabated gas supplying electricity in the system,” he said.
“But obviously if we’ve got datacentres not connected to electricity but powered by unabated gas then it does raise an interesting question about what that means for the Clean Power 2030 target.”
Eleanor Warburton, Ofgem’s director for energy system design and development, said: “The growth of artificial intelligence is affecting many aspects of life including energy – this includes an associated growth in data centres.”
“Connections are being delivered, but the system must work better for projects that are viable and ready to proceed. We are in the process of reforming demand connections so that viable projects can connect faster while Government is looking at the question of whether changes are needed regarding the prioritisation of strategic connections, which could include some AI projects.”
Kat Jones, the director of Action to Protect Rural Scotland, an Edinburgh-based charity, said: “Those promoting the rush for hyperscale AI datacentres seem to be living in a parallel reality where the last 50 years of climate science hasn’t happened, and where we aren’t already experiencing the signs of climate breakdown.”
She added: “The conference sessions on AI and hyperscale datacentres seemed to be taking it for granted that onsite gas generation would be needed if these ultra energy intensive developments are to happen, due to the impossibility of connecting them to our congested grid.”
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