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.
Silvia 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.
But 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…
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