The report was published on Wednesday as global leaders gathered in Turkey for the 31st UN climate summit<\/a>, where increasing electrification \u2013 ideally from clean sources \u2013 is a central part of discussions. However, a number of key European leaders, including from France and Germany, will not be at Cop31, instead heading to Dublin where EU leaders will hold their first dedicated AI summit on Friday.<\/p>\n Mark Daly, the head of datacentres and emerging tech at BloombergNEF, said: \u201cThe extraordinary economics around AI are making speed to power one of the most important priorities for defining constraints on datacentre developers.<\/p>\n \u201cThe climate outcome will depend not only on how much electricity these facilities use, but on how quickly grids can connect them and whether power systems add cleaner generation alongside that demand.\u201d<\/p>\n By 2035, the electricity demand of AI datacentres was predicted to almost quadruple to 2,354 terawatt-hours \u2013 equivalent to 7% of global electricity demand \u2013 the report said.<\/p>\n AI datacentres<\/a> use a massive amount of electricity to power servers and cool equipment, and to run facility systems.<\/p>\n Daly said while the developers of the future datacentres claimed their gas-fired power supplies would be temporary while they waited for grid connections, once they were online, the economics could encourage them to continue generating energy, creating a longer-term fossil-fuel lock-in risk.<\/p>\n The report said ensuring new datacentres were connected to the grid was the more sustainable option. Faster grid connections were crucial to limiting emissions impacts and locking in fossil fuel risk, it said.<\/p>\n UK planned datacentres<\/a> made more than 100 inquiries in 2024-5 to connect to gas as a result of delays in securing access to the electricity grid, according to Future Energy Networks, the representative body for the UK gas networks.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a>Free newsletter |Every weekday<\/p>\n Sign up to First Edition<\/p>\n Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what\u2019s happening and why it matters<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n For example, Wapseys Wood, Buckinghamshire and Quest Park, Bedfordshire are seeking to build their own<\/a> on-site gas-fired power stations because of the long wait to connect to the grid. The datacentres are among the first to be fast-tracked through the government\u2019s nationally significant infrastructure project regime, which allows developers to rapidly deliver major infrastructure, bypassing locally elected planning authorities.<\/p>\n But the use of fossil fuel power generation on site is likely to be repeated by many more UK sites after the chancellor, John Healey, gave the green light for datacentres to build and run temporary on-site fossil fuel power stations while they wait for connections to the grid, as part of a so-called datacentre covenant<\/a>.<\/p>\n Oliver Hayes, the head of policy and campaigns at Global Action Plan , said: \u201cPrivate gas power stations for datacentres should be a red line for any government serious about climate action, so it\u2019s shocking to see the chancellor give them his explicit backing.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one seriously believes these gas power stations will be temporary \u2013 once they\u2019re built, they\u2019ll lock in high emissions for years.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Developers of AI datacentres plan to build on-site climate-destroying gas power stations on a huge scale to meet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":831278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-831277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831277","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=831277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/831278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/1794409330_840_1000.jpg\")
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