UK prime minister Keir Starmer has said that AI can be used in a wide variety of applications, including to speed up planning consultations, adding that prioritising AI development will directly support the government’s mission to become a clean energy superpower.
According to the UK government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, AI Growth Zones will be established to encourage rollout of data centres. The first is set to be in Culham, Oxfordshire, home to the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority.
The government says this will also serve as a testing ground to drive forward research on how sustainable energy like nuclear fusion can power AI ambitions. UK prime minister Keir Starmer said AI growth will directly support the government’s mission to become a clean energy superpower by tapping into technologies like small modular reactors (SMRs).
Under the same plan, a council to better understand the energy demands of AI has been formed.
The AI Energy Council will be chaired by energy secretary Ed Miliband and Peter Kyle, secretary of state for science, innovation and technology. Working alongside energy companies, the council will address challenges fuelling (and fuelled by) the technology’s development.
In September, the government classified data centres as critical national infrastructure, putting them on equal footing with water, energy and emergency services.
While plans to support the development of AI in the UK do touch on energy use and sustainability, so far no concrete plans have been set for how this will be ensured.
A report by Norwegian-headquartered consultancy firm DNV found global electricity demand will double by 2050 as reliance on fossil fuels decreases. It suggested that the pathway to a decarbonised energy system requires significant grid expansion, solutions for grid congestion and new business models to accommodate rising demand and generation from wind and solar.
Remi Eriksen, group president and CEO at DNV, said: “Deep digitalisation, including the application of AI, is crucial for managing the increased complexity of a renewable-dominated power system.”
The grid connection roadblock
To manage the complexity, though, the data centres that facilitate AI must come online. That means they, too, must find a way to connect to the grid; the same barriers facing new renewable energy projects apply.
Upon becoming president of Scottish construction industry trade association SELECT in June, Mike Stark said that the UK’s National Grid could struggle to satisfy the voracious energy needs of AI and the systems it supports. He questioned whether the UK’s current electrical infrastructure was fit for purpose in the face of the massive increase in predicted demand, particularly from the power-hungry data centres supporting AI.
Speaking exclusively to Current±, Stark described the struggle to facilitate the scale of grid connections needed.
He likened the current approach to stacking extension cables: “Not thinking about the fundamental source of everything; what about looking at the fundamental source of the grid, is it suitable to take this additional load?
“It’s adding and adding and adding on to something that may be, at source, struggling to meet the demands and might not be fit for purpose.”
Having hit pause on new renewable energy projects looking to apply for a grid connection, the UK National Energy System Operator (NESO) is promising to deliver a major overhaul of the connection process in order to support the number of new developments that will need to come online.
Meanwhile, National Grid, which owns and maintains the high-voltage electricity transmission network in the UK, is working on a ‘Great Grid Upgrade’ that will deliver the hardware necessary for increasing electricity needs.
Data centre energy demand
It is worth noting that while all data centres make huge energy demands, those facilitating AI require an even higher amount.
Reducing their reliance on fossil fuels means effective build-out of renewable electricity sources and cooling methods, which tends to require grid efficiencies that are unachievable under the strain from AI development.
Data centres operate 24/7, 365 days a year, as they must ensure servers are running non-stop to ensure data availability and reliability.
Another critical aspect of data centres is the redundancy and backup measures installed in most modern systems. These are often built to ensure data availability in case of hardware failures. Depending on each facility, they may run multiple servers simultaneously, increasing energy consumption.
Locating data centres near renewables is one way that companies aim to ensure relative sustainability, which is is why places like Scotland and Ireland house proportionately large numbers of them.
Ireland sets an example
Ireland’s proliferating data centre landscape, with a vast number of sites housed in the country, is also partly due to its cooler climate, meaning that less power is needed to prevent the systems from overheating.
Other factors have seen Ireland rise to the top of Europe’s data centre hotspots, beating rival markets of the FLAPD group (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin).
Ireland has “deep sea fibre cable connections from the US, Europe and other regions, and a common law legal system which is attractive to many Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) businesses. These factors incentivise international businesses to select Ireland as the country to develop data centres.
Metered electricity consumption statistics for 2023 released by the Central Statistics Office for Ireland in summer last year showed data centres in the country took a 21% share of the total usage.
Data centres used more electricity than the total amount for urban dwellings (18%) and for rural dwellings (10%). For both categories, electricity consumption has remained steady since 2022. Urban housing used marginally less electricity in 2023 than in 2022 (a drop of 1%).
By comparison, the load taken by data centres has rapidly increased: in 2015, data centres used 5% of metered electricity, rising to 18% in 2022. In the one year since, that reached 21%.
As the result of a push for global AI leadership, the UK could see a similarly rapid increase in the share of electricity used by the technology, which in and of itself looks set to only worsen the energy transition outlook for the UK.