New report by London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee says new policies urgently needed to meet the huge electricity demands of tech
Amid all the hype around AI, we’ve sometimes heard warnings of hidden costs – and questions about who exactly will pay. AI and similar technologies depend on the compute power of energy-intensive data centres. A new report from the London Assembly lays out the impact that such high demand for electricity has on the communities where they are located.
Photo by Josh Olalde / Unsplash
The report says that this demand has hampered and will continue to hamper new housing developments. It calls for urgent changes to planning policy and law.
Gridlocked: how planning can ease London’s electricity constraints, takes as its starting point a serious problem in late 2022, when 19 housing developments – comprising some 5,300 new homes – could not get connected to the grid as it had reached capacity.
Some developers were told that they would have to wait until 2037 for a grid connection. In the boroughs of Ealing, Hillingdon and Hounslow, there were concerns that all new housing projects would have to be halted.
Since that crisis, the Greater London Authority (GLA) has worked with partners such as National Grid, Ofgem and Scottish and Southern Energy Networks on a range of short-term fixes to the problem, as well as revising the management of connections and looking more long term.
But the new report lays out that the fundamental problem remains in place: high demand for electricity. What’s more, it says data centres are in large part to blame.
According to the report, a data centre uses the equivalent electricity of 1,000 homes. It can’t give a total number of data centres in west London, but in July 2023 there were 29 known data centres in Brent, Ealing, Hillingdon, Hounslow and Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC). The implication is that there are now many more – and the number will only rise with increased rollout of AI and other such data-intensive technologies.
Of the report’s 10 recommendations, 5 mention data centres.
- The GLA’s Infrastructure Coordination Service should publish the results of its data centres forecasting project as soon as it is ready, and not wait for the London Plan’s evidence pack.
- The Government should introduce a separate use class for data centres.
- The GLA should include a data centre policy in the next London Plan to enable a more strategic approach to their development, recognising their distinct and significant energy impacts.
- The GLA should include a policy as part of the whole life-cycle carbon assessment, requiring energy demand assessments for large energy users, like data centres, in the next London Plan.
- The GLA should ensure that, in conjunction with national regulations, the London Plan mandates future data centres to contribute to heat networks where appropriate.
James Small-Edwards AM, Chair of the London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee, says: ‘The government wants the UK to lead the way globally in artificial intelligence and digital innovation. Bold goals that, if successful, will drive huge demand for data centres which are often staggeringly energy intensive. But if we don’t plan ahead, we run the risk of not meeting those ambitions, or realising those ambitions at the expense of urgently needed housing and infrastructure.
‘If there is to be just one takeaway from this investigation it must be this: grid capacity cannot be an afterthought. We need a proactive, coordinated approach that ensures energy networks are anticipating heightened demand; that local plans integrate energy considerations; and that major energy users are managed strategically.’
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