The SCOPE

Powering the UK’s data centres – the need for new ideas

• Stantec UK

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With the UK’s grid capacity stretched and an ever-growing need for data centres, what choices do we have to power them? 

What impact will grid connectivity reforms have? How can we scale alternative forms of power generation? And could data centres even help to address power loads and support decarbonisation? 

Sharing their views are Amy Turner, power connections lead at SEGRO, Jon Clark, associate at construction consultancy RLB, Peter Sibley, divisional director for nuclear at Stantec, and Jesal Chandi, senior utilities consultant at Stantec. Hosted by Graham Munday at Stantec.

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AI data centers alone are estimated to need 68GW of power globally by 2027. That's almost double all global data sent to power requirements from 2022, with the UK's grid capacity stretched but an ever growing need for data centers as nationally critical infrastructure. What choices do we have to power them? In this episode of The SCOPE, we explore how grid connectivity reforms will help. We ask how alternative forms of power generation can be scaled faster and quicker, and we consider how data centers can actually address power loads and support decarbonization. Joining me today are Amy Turner. Power Connections lead for SEGRO, a UK real estate investment trust, and a leading owner, asset manager and developer of data centers and modern warehousing. Peter Sibley, director and lead of Stantec Nuclear Consultancy Service. Jon Clarke, an associate in the carbon and energy team at RLB Global Construction property and management consultancy. And Jesal Chandi, a consultant for Stantec specializing in grid capacity mapping and strategic power solutions. I'm Graham Munday, welcome to The SCOPE a podcast from Stantec, a global leader in sustainable engineering, architecture and environmental consulting. Jon, thanks so much for joining us as a guest here from RLB. Jon, if I can start with yourselves. Data centers, as I said in the introduction, are critical national infrastructure. We need them 24 seven. The serious consequences if the service is interrupted. So power is a key thing, and their power needs have changed quite dramatically over the years. Can you start us off by just explaining how that's evolved? Over the last couple of decades and how is expected to change again in the next 5 to 10 years? Data centers have evolved traditionally from a DC perspective. 20 years ago, you're looking at what was originally like a cooler or a killer logistics site whereby servers and PCs were being stored. The that was so that large companies could run their I.T infrastructure rather than having it in their back offices. They can then move it out and have that resiliency and architecture being built for them, that they can have 24, seven commitments. They had people on hand 24/7 to access the sites and to be able to be very controlled environments. The power needs of originally, from that time, we were looking at racks between 3 to 12kW. We're looking at sites that originally five maximum 10 to 15MW and over. The last was very stable, probably for about 5 to 10 years. And over the last five years we've seen an gradual increase of power coming through. For I admit, as there's been a development in the background being driven by the likes of Intel, AMD and Nvidia, we see more and more of the server and the power increasing. And for a while we saw it sort of stagnate. So there's Moore's Law, where every 12 to 18 months we're seeing the the transition, the, the power of the CPUs increasing or doubling each time. That's stagnated for a while as the servers got to a point whereby the power was primarily being utilized more and more for actually the cooling of the infrastructure. And then over the last five years, we've seen now within the likes of Nvidia, raising the game, increasing the power demands, whereby switch from CPUs to AGP, whereby they are able to do far more transactions and chip developments and accelerate that curve. And what that then means is that we're now seeing servers which are now utilizing between ten, 20, 30kW of power, and we're now seeing rack densities increasing from 30 to 100kW. And I'm really seeing that increase. Okay. Thank you. I mean, Jon, that's a great intro in terms of giving us a a sense of where this market, if you like, has changed quite dramatically over a period of time. Amy, if I may turn to yourself and thank you also for joining us as a guest, some C grade today. Let's pick up on the power aspect that Jon has talked about there. Now, you bring a very interesting perspective because, you have previously worked for a dino, and now, of course, working for C grow developing, you know, big logistics warehouses, but also data centers, and needing that power. What is what is C Grove's approach? Now in 2025 and going forward with this. So yeah, it's been really interesting sitting both sides of the fence, not only having seen the challenges previously for the DNA, using keeping up with the growth, not just with DCS, but electrification of vehicles. Obviously the growth of automation as well. It's one of those where you now come the other side of the fence and you see the challenges that sit with the clients and where I think everybody took for granted before you filled in an application form and you got your power and the timescales were relatively palatable. And now, from a business perspective, whatever you think is early is an early enough for the amount of power that data centers need. It's a really lengthy process, and I think there needs to be much more collaborative work that goes on between the clients and the Doe, Danos, and Tios because not only do we want to make sure that we're dealing with our immediate customers, but we also want to make sure we've got a much longer line of sight going forward to make sure that we don't find ourselves in a similar situation in ten years time. We need to be really mindful about the strategy that we take, and trying to find out if there are green solutions that actually are complementary to the grid supplies, where that will always continue to be our focus for the near future. We need to make sure that not only as we encourage our tenants to sign green leases and use fully renewable, energy. We need to make sure that obviously, we are making sure we're paving the way for any future opportunities as well. Okay. Thank you. And Jessica, if we if we can turn to you to now pick that baton up a little bit about, you know, what organizations are tackling here. There are as we as with the early stage of 2025, as we record this, there are some landmark reforms coming into place out there in terms of, power and access to power, which will hopefully help people to tackle some of this and drive the industry forward. Walk us through some of those things. What's what's changing, what's happening. So Amy set the context perfectly, first of all, about the increase overall in the demand for electricity, because everything is going electric and development itself is going higher. There's a compounding effect of the grid needing to catch up to all of this extra demand, because there were a bit caught behind. There's a lot of reinforcements going on, which leads to the large amount of the large waiting times we see for connections when we apply. For now, which is why Ofgem and NIO are working together with this reform at the transmission level. Talk, talk us a little bit through Nexo and the Q reform. And maybe for some of our listeners who aren't, up to up to speed with the acronyms, Nexo stands for National Energy System Operator. Okay. So they are the system operator for national grid electricity transmission and get who we colloquially call. National grid and Ofgem are the regulator for electrical tuners all the network operators and and what what is ni so doing. What are these reforms and the Q the changing of the Q issue. So essentially there is a large backlog of connections in the connection. Q right now this is people that have applied receive connection offers and are not progressing as part of that because they are in the queue and have accepted offers NI. So they are sterilizing a lot of capacity within the queue. So the main aim of these reforms is to try and clear the queue, and b keep the queue stricter to stop the zombie projects building up again. So right now there are connection times of up to ten plus years, because there's lots of reinforcement of having to model and having to account for a large amount of mainly generation projects coming up. And talk to us about what this might open the door to. I mean, do we have some figures, in terms of how much could get freed up here? Yeah. So essentially from the like I said, this is focusing on the generation side of things. And they're going from the current approach of first come, first serve in the queue to first ready, first served, and also the other extra element involved is the Clean Power Plan for 2030 of still trying to meet the nation's targets of trying to, you know, increase the clean power usage within the country. This is and this is significant. And, Amy, if I may just turn back to you briefly as well, in terms of as an organization, see grow, how you're seeing that the the first, first ready, first served. If I've got this right. How are you looking at these reforms and which will put a hold on things at the moment as we record this or as we go into the spring of 2025? But how are you looking at those reforms in terms about how that helps you as an organization? So as an organization, we're really hoping that it's actually going to improve some of our timescales as them just quite rightly said, there's a lot of what they're determining as zombie projects that are in the queue at the moment because they are so oversubscribed. But obviously, while those connections are sterilizing the availability of power, it means that those of us that are really ready to be connected are actually getting pushed further and further back and it's having a huge detriment to us. So from our perspective, we're really hoping that they offer some time scale improvements. Okay. Yeah. Because the challenge as well with these larger timescales is developers can't make accurate business decisions. You just because you're so far ahead. Again, you keep building on the problem by making speculative applications and hoping that by the time that comes around, the date might move closer, and then you can actually use that power appropriately, depending on which site you've got it for real. I mean, it sounds to me like this could really drive some quite radical change. We've recorded previous podcasts where we've talked about some of the challenges of grid connections, etc., but suddenly here we've almost we've moved on, I hope, and this could really drive some quite radical change. Jon, I'm going to come to you in a second with a question that I know we've got here around, a loud balancing and decarbonization, but I'm going to change the subject slightly and draw Peter in. Actually, in terms of, other things that can dramatically change the picture. And, Peter, you're, an absolute expert in the nuclear, industry and nuclear consultancy. And a lot of times we think about nuclear is the big developments Hinkley, Sizewell, etc., but small modular, small modular reactors, if I can say it, smart. Getting a lot of media attention and focus and potentially coming through and could be a game changer in, in sectors such as this. What are we seeing? How likely is this to be a solution now? Thanks, Graham. It's great to be talking about nuclear in the context of high energy demand and users. I think it's definitely going to happen. I think the key is, when's it going to happen? How fast can it happen? And I'll come on to that again in a moment. But I think what's really exciting is the very contemporary alignment we're now seeing between widespread expansion of nuclear technology at all scale, gigawatt scale and CMOs as a means of securing, energy demand, you know, decarbonizing energy grids, but also alongside that, this proliferation that Jon was talking about in the power demands of the AI revolution and data centers and the two sort of coming hand in hand now in parallel. So I think there's a lot of things we can talk about on how these can work together. And I think what's really, amplified this. In the autumn, we had large tech companies like Amazon, like Microsoft, like Google talking about nuclear quite readily in the media. And that's really brought it to the kind of forefront the largest investment houses are talking about investing in nuclear as a green, type of technology. And actually in the, in Europe, just recently, data for and Westinghouse announced an MoU to talk about collaboration around powering data centers, which is fantastic. So, in the UK context, you know, like a lot of countries around the world, UK is is pursuing SMEs, small directors, the idea being that they're potentially quicker to build. They could be built in factories that easy to deploy them more flexibly sited. They're scalable. You know, there's lots of different virtues. And alongside the large scale sort of gigawatt scale nuclear could offer a really good sort of backbone to our energy bonds going forwards per data centers. Then the benefits are, consistent right size, power solutions, which are scalable to the energy demands of the specific data center. Lots less land then than equivalent in renewables, wind and solar and all the rest of it. And they've come equipped with, you know, robust safety features. A, you know, there's a long track record, of course, of nuclear technology and that kind of thing. So I think it's really exciting. And I think what the industry is facing now is coming back to how quickly is these different jigsaw pieces that need to come together, whether it be the regulatory processes we need to go through to approve these, these facilities, the siting and the planning permissions, the investment obviously, that coming forward to the development technology, the social license to build in new communities, with nuclear technologies, which might not be familiar. And what I'm really interested to see and really sort of keen to sort of promote this idea of government and industry collaboration around this. And that's going to involve the end users and the developers as well, because the nuclear sector hasn't spoken to these people for we need to inform. So my question to Amy would be, you know, how can we do that better? And, you know, where does companies like see grow? What do you what do you think of nuclear? Well, how do you approach it? I think it's really exciting to talk about new options, when obviously the constraints of what has historically existed, so prevalent in our day to day work at the moment. Obviously, we're aware of MOU that's happened over the last few days, and we have started some very early preliminary conversations regarding SMEs. And I think from our point of view, it's really important that we engage with the people that have the technology. It's important that we engage in, make sure our put our clients minds at ease and offer them a solution that they can be confident in. And I think you're right. I think we absolutely need to do some sort of collaboration. That means we can really be the trailblazers for things like this and actually make it something that it's becomes more accessible and a more commonplace opportunity for people to explore. I mean, it's a live conversation, I'm assuming, within an organization like yours and your peer group, I'm assuming. Absolutely. And I'll be honest with you, I think that our knowledge around that is really, really limited. Mine certainly is. And I think as we kind of go further down the path, it's important that from a technology point of view, we have people in that are teaching us about those things, explaining the viability of explaining the pluses and then also giving us the information that allows us to allay the concerns of our end users as well. Peter, your career has been built, in the nuclear sector. I mean, we've worked together for ten years. The education is clearly is key here, isn't it? And I you touched on the earlier I'm a sense of for the, for that sector, the nuclear sector. It's certainly opened up a window to a whole new market and are probably recognizing that they need to communicate and educate a whole different audience. No, that's absolutely right. You know, it's a large PR exercise to some extent, but I think we've seen some really important, shifts in the UK around sort of public acceptance around nuclear and what it can mean in terms of energy security and a long term sort of pricing of energy and that kind of thing. We've seen the establishment of Great British Nuclear, which will now facilitate that government and industry collaboration to really drive these projects forward. And actually, in the small vendors, we're seeing a very different breed of developer. These are technologist and entrepreneurs. They're not traditional nuclear developers. And that's quite exciting. And they're very, you know, confident and quite bullish about how they want to bring their product to market. And they need to work with, you know, anyone who listen really to, to kind of bring it through to fruition. And that to me sounds like a very natural, link as well to the, to the data center operators in terms of the, the words you just use there in terms of entrepreneurs and, you know, very different type of breed of developer. Yes, Jon. Yeah. I mean, for me, it opens up Pandora's box in a really nice way because by having the likes of new technologies like Smiles and Mars coming through, what that means is effectively where there is now land available, they can either look at off grid or microgrid solutions, whereby it gives us a bit more flexibility. And then not then relying, unfortunately, on the DNA of the CEO or national government structures to actually support that and implement it so they can actually accelerate to a certain degree and actually then look a longer term strategy about how we can actually look to feed that back into the grid later on and actually look to support the grid of actually load balancing as well for the growth and development of future sites or future development. So it makes us into gives us quite a lot of opportunities. So it's a really interesting, time moves on as always in these podcasts, and I'm going to pick up on a few other things that we've talked about offline previously, and almost like some quick questions to you, Jon. There was a question I skipped over earlier that I just want to come back to and ask you about, data centers helping with load balancing and decarbonization. And I, I think some of this was about phased development as well. Talk to us about that so very quickly. So the way it works is that because data centers can get the power all at once from likes of Nessa Mob, because it's a modular build out. So effectively we're looking at 4 or 5 stages of the build that gives us capacity, whereby they can then let's just apply that to the grade or to other networks or businesses, etc. but as part of that, they've then got a load balancing effect where they can actually help the grid balance itself. And because we've got ups's and redundancies and switch gears and there's very large infrastructure in place, it sorts of frees up and it actually then helps towards the government's like, clarification of how they can actually so like carbonite and actually free carbonite is actually the great infrastructure longer and quicker as well as part of that strategy. So that's one of the challenges we're trying to address and look at by looking at this type of technology. Okay. Thank you. And as I said I'm going to bounce around over here a bit with you Jessica. Just a it's literally a minute from you as well on hydrogen. And if you kind of pick up on a study that, Stantec has been doing, with the gas networks because I think that's also quite interesting in terms of new thinking, new technology, new ideas. Yeah. So essentially, as we've seen, we've said today that DC developers are trying to get sites up as quickly as possible, and that's driving demand up. Whereas gas networks on the other side there, demand is going down because of all the same sort of clean power net zero targets we've been talking about here. So for gas networks to try and almost like get back stronger, they're trying to find new energy sinks where they can give all this spare gas capacity. That's then quite extensive network. Obviously, it's not that sustainable. Using a nonrenewable fuel to hire these that to power these high energy users. But that's where then putting hydrogen and blending it either into the national gas natural gas network or repurposing or re shaping the network for the hydrogen, can then be used to transport and power some certain day centers. I think it's really important, the opportunity to the fact that we have these networks. Yeah, we we need to come off of gas, but we still got these networks. How do we use them? The infrastructure is there to be used. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Jon, if I may, geothermal. Now, you, you you've written a piece on this and I just wondered for our listeners whether we could summarize that piece on on the opportunity from geothermal, generating power for us. Geothermal is a great natural resource that can be utilized. The key thing for geothermal is understanding where it can be applied effectively. The UK for example, is not a natural geothermal site. We're not like Iceland. We're not in America. We don't have the Rockies or the Cascades, etc.. So it means there's different cap. It's not it's costs that have to go into that. So the best location I can think of geothermal is probably like in bath, where there's actually there is that natural heat coming through. Otherwise in the UK it's not really got go by like five kilometers deep. So but geothermal is a great technology. But again, it comes down to understanding where it can be deployed, where the benefits are and what the best case can be for that. Otherwise it's a case. We've got to think globally and for that type of technology to be deployed effectively. And from a commercial perspective, how much is it going to cost to do it? Yeah. Fair enough, fair enough. And, Amy, we talked a little bit about, private ideas as well. The opportunity to work with the independent distribution network operators, has really increased over the last probably ten years, where everyone immediately defaulted to the distribution network. Update operators, the UK power networks, your assets. There's now a much wider pool to go to. And whilst you still relying on essentially a connection point at the very start of your, scheme, that means there's an opportunity for others to take on the downstream work, which can be cost wise, a little bit more efficient. And it also means that potentially the timescales can be improved as well. Okay. Thank you. And any final comments from any of you as well about, the biggest things emerging that can transform how we power this growth in data centers. Jon, you started off brilliantly by explaining almost where this sector is grown from and why it's become so enormous. And it's incredibly important in terms of the UK economy. I think we just going to continue to see data centers rise because we're seeing more and more technology shifting. We're going to see more and more sites, more edge with a more sort of like small remote sites being deployed for, large language models and less dependency on the bigger sites going forward. So we're just going to have to understand that is now critical infrastructure. It is now, needed in everyday life. We are seeing the rise of robotics and smart vehicles and more and more smart technology. And it's how we learn to fit the system and actually make it work for us more effectively. And then also looking at other benefits of this as well. So is there, district heating networks off the back of that from the heat? Is there more power? Does that then reduce the costs for everyday consumers as well? Well, all the benefits that we can then drive through to other industries. I mean, if I could just add one point, I think my big takeaway would be that everybody just needs to be open minded about opportunities. And I say that from the client side, from the tenant side, from the distribution network operators side, from the government side. Let's not stay in our lane where we've been for such a long time. Let's be really open to new opportunities and try and be collaborative for those. Yeah, I totally agree with Amy. It's really exciting that nuclear's become part of that conversation as well. It won't be the one solution for all data centers. It needs to sit there alongside the mix with renewables, with geothermal, with hydrogen. You know, let's be part of that mix. It could be a real enabler and a sort of catalyst for taking that data center revolution forwards and positively. Chancellor, as we as you've covered in this session as well, the the the reform to to the grid is is going to undoubtedly help as well. Yeah. On top of the reform as well. That should help clear the queue and bring connection times in. But the next step for that is having more data available from the transmission and distribution operators, because right now you have to almost decide which substations have capacity, which one is constrained, apply for and then see what comes out from the other side. Whereas on the embedded on the generation side, they have what's called a tech register transmission, embedded capacity register that shows all generation connections at each substation, when what the size of the connection is and when the connection is planned to be completed. If they can have that same data and the demand side, then again, you can see where it's constrained, where there is actually availability, and then target applications for the right areas and stop increasingly long connection times for data centers. Well, data centers are an absolutely fundamental part of our modern economy and driving our driving our economy. And this conversation has really helped to show that they can be powered. And there is exciting new opportunities and solutions coming forward as well. So, thank you to Jon, to Amy, to Peter and Jesal. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe to the SCOPE, on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can find all of our episodes on the Stantec website.