London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacentre builds

While the UK government wants to turbocharge datacentre construction, a newly published report says there are already 400 GW worth of outstanding requests for connection to the power grid around London, and regulator Ofgem estimates 60-70 percent of these will never happen.

These figures are drawn from the EMEA Datacentre Market Update for 2024, published by global commercial real estate business, Cushman & Wakefield, and illustrate the challenge facing datacentre developers.

Most British server farms cluster around the capital, and projects are facing growing delays to get connected to the grid, a problem that may be exacerbated as more and more facilities are planned to serve the growing market for cloud and AI services.

One of the UK's major commercial property developers says it would be pumping investment into new datacentres if it could just secure the energy supply needed for those facilities, reflecting a growing problem worldwide.

David Sleath, chief executive of Segro, said in an interview with The Times that he would be investing "hundreds of millions and more" in building new bit barns, but for the issues with getting the projects wired up to the national grid.

"The single biggest constraint is access to power," Sleath said. He claimed that this is a perennial problem, but one that is becoming a bigger issue now because it's holding up funding in critical sectors that the current government believes are important to "the UK success story."

In some cases, Segro's development teams face a wait of "a number of years" for local substations to be upgraded in order to increase grid capacity, Sleath said. The company, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange and Euronext Paris, has a current market capitalization of just over £11 billion ($14.2 billion).