{"id":717169,"date":"2026-07-29T11:42:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T11:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/717169\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T11:42:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T11:42:08","slug":"data-centres-could-pay-hundreds-of-millions-in-deposits-for-power-demands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/717169\/","title":{"rendered":"Data centres could pay hundreds of millions in deposits for power demands"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ofgem has proposed new measures which could see developers of data centres made to pay hundreds of millions of pounds up front.<\/p>\n

The British energy regulator said a refundable fee should be charged for projects that want to connect to the network, amid mounting demand for connections to the electricity grid.<\/p>\n

It is proposing developers pay a deposit between \u00a3237,500 to \u00a3712,500 per megawatt – meaning data centres seeking 1 gigawatt (GW) of power would have to pay hundreds of millions up front, paid back if the project was completed.<\/p>\n

The proposal follows growing opposition in parts of the country<\/a> to plans for new data centres, which are needed to power the artificial intelligence boom.<\/p>\n

Data centres are large buildings which house computer servers used to store and process data and run the digital services which power the internet.<\/p>\n

Ofgem has started a consultation on its proposals, which will run until 16 September.<\/p>\n

It said the amount of electricity capacity being requested by projects seeking to connect to the grid had risen from 41 GW to 125 GW in the past year, reflecting a sharp increase in demand.<\/p>\n

This is significantly more than double 2025’s peak electricity demand in Britain of around 46 GW.<\/p>\n

The regulator said the projects would have to hit key milestones to keep their place in the grid connection queue, which has seen a surge in demand.<\/p>\n

An increasing number of centres have been built around the world in recent years to provide the computing power needed to train and run AI systems.<\/p>\n

But they are controversial, especially for people who live near them. <\/p>\n

Residents have raised concerns about noise, electricity demand and the large amounts of water sometimes used to cool the high-performance chips that generate vast amounts of heat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ofgem has proposed new measures which could see developers of data centres made to pay hundreds of millions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":717170,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-717169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/717170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}