More than 100 new datacentres in the UK plan to burn gas to generate electricity, some potentially doing so permanently.<\/p>\n
British officials say this is an inevitable consequence of a years-long wait to connect to the National Grid, and raises an \u201cinteresting question\u201d about the UK\u2019s climate targets.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s 100GW of datacentre projects in the queue,\u201d said Stuart Okin, the director of cyber regulation and AI at Ofgem.<\/p>\n
\u201cClearly that\u2019s not all going to be able to connect [to the grid]. If a project isn\u2019t going to get a connection, it is going to have to come up with an alternative method.\u201d<\/p>\n
Okin spoke on the sidelines of All-Energy, the UK\u2019s largest renewable and low-carbon energy conference.<\/p>\n
Officials, businesspeople and activists attending the event in Glasgow acknowledged a marked shift over the past year in willingness of UK developers \u2013 and authorities \u2013 to consider using fossil fuels to power the UK\u2019s AI ambitions.<\/p>\n
Silvia Simon, the head of research at Future Energy Networks, which represents the UK\u2019s natural gas suppliers, said the group had received \u201cmore than 100\u201d requests for gas connections from datacentre operators in the past two years.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cGas networks are seeing a lot of interest from datacentre developers looking to secure a gas connection,\u201d she said. \u201cNot just for resilience, but for primary supply. So this is already an indication that they\u2019re really struggling to get through to the electricity networks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Governments and big tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars into a frenzied and ambitious AI programme.<\/p>\n
In the US, many of these projects rely on gas-fired generation. In Tennessee, activists have battled<\/a> Elon Musk\u2019s xAI for illegally running tens of methane-powered generators, risking the health of the surrounding community.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, 11 US datacentres built to serve Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and xAI reportedly<\/a> will emit more carbon than the country of Morocco. These emissions will come from off-grid gas generators built by the datacentre developers themselves.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cUsing gas networks was previously avoided due to carbon, permitting, and land-take impacts, and has typically only been considered as a temporary fix,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But developers are now increasingly turning to fossil fuels, \u201cin some cases requesting over 100MW of gas power on a permanent basis\u201d.<\/p>\n Julian Leslie, the director of strategic planning at the UK\u2019s National Energy System Operator (Neso), said this gas buildout could complicate Britain\u2019s climate goals.<\/p>\n \u201cThe target was to get less than 5% of unabated gas supplying electricity in the system,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cBut obviously if we\u2019ve 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<\/a> target.\u201d<\/p>\n Eleanor Warburton, Ofgem\u2019s director for energy system design and development, said: \u201cThe growth of artificial intelligence is affecting many aspects of life including energy \u2013 this includes an associated growth in data centres.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cConnections 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.\u201d<\/p>\n