The rapid rise in prominence of cloud services and now, AI, despite the obvious economic advantages, is rightly inextricably linked with serious concerns about the UK’s energy capacity.
According to Richard Schomberg, the special envoy for smart electrification at the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), UK grid connection requests for data centres have surged from 41 GW in November 2024 to 125 GW by June 2025, “exceeding the country’s entire current peak electricity demand of roughly 45 GW”.
The demand is tough on the grid and creates problems for firms that need this capacity.
Schomberg told UKTN that the connection queue for demand grew 460% in the six months leading to June of last year, pushing some projects to wait up to 15 years....
