Militwit will probably tell them to pray harder to the sky gods to fart in their general direction. Energy generation isnt his priority, green madness is. Energy generation will only become the priority when it is so politically damaging to carry on pursuing ideology over reality.

Did you perhaps get a degree in electrical engineering, hmmm? Or with repeated references to "sky gods" a Bachelor of Divinity? In which case, pray tell.

Shurely even Ed Milliwatt realises that you can't power a datacentre with an intermittent energy source.. But then again he is a nitwit..

Ideally, we would build some nukes to power the bullshit barns, then the AI bubble pops and the rest of us can use the cheap energy that follows. But nukes sadly take very a long time to build now, due to some rather excessive regulation which the fossil fuel industries lobbied for, to save themselves from nuclear competition..

What we'll probably end up with is more renewables, and regional pricing, so us plebs have to fork out a fortune for energy while the bullshit barns get it on the cheap if they build in Scotland. Then the incentive to modernise and upgrade the transmission network disappears (why invest money to alleviate grid constraints if you can simply charge more for electricity in constrained regions?), then something goes bang and all the lights go out. Welcome to Britain.

Sadly I think we will end up with more CCGT and an overstretched grid.

Sadly I think we will end up with more CCGT and an overstretched grid.

But this government is smart. So British (ok, Chinese) Steel is about to shut down. The cunning plan is to get taxpayers to import coke to keep it running for a few more months. The UK can produce our own coke, but the government won't let it. Mining our own would improve supply security and create jobs. But the government is smart. The country that gave the world the Industrial Revolution will be deindustrialised, because Starmer, Millibrain etc are smart.

That's where the Conservatives could campaign around a promise to get rid of renewable energy, re-open the pits, resurrect the NCB and NUM and create an AI powered holographic Scargil

Vote Tory and support our glorious 5year plan for national coal power and shiny biceps

That's where the Conservatives could campaign around a promise to get rid of renewable energy, re-open the pits, resurrect the NCB and NUM and create an AI powered holographic Scargil

Vote Tory and support our glorious 5year plan for national coal power and shiny biceps

And then Labour would attack them for stealing their previous stance when they elected Corbyn as leader...?

But Corbyn failed to promise a glorious 5year PPI plan (in conjunction with party donor JCB) to boost state tractor production

"The UK can produce our own coke, but the government won't let it"

Here we get into the problem of exporting our carbon. UK made steel would probably be less carbon intensive than say Polish or Chinese steel. BUT as part of the carbon reduction we can't allow that to be released within our territorial air volume.

Here we get into the problem of exporting our carbon. UK made steel would probably be less carbon intensive than say Polish or Chinese steel. BUT as part of the carbon reduction we can't allow that to be released within our territorial air volume.

But that's why Net Zero is just nuts, and Scope regulations and accounting requirements are just a waste of time & resources. So we need 1t coke to make steel. We can import that, and have to account for carbon emissions along the whole journey. Or we dig it up here and the journey is shorter. Assuming equally efficient mining, the emissions costs per tonne are going to be the same wherever it's mined. So say, shipping coke from Australia's going to have a carbon footprint greater than digging it up in the North East. Or we let China import Coke from Australia, smelt steel, ship it to the UK and we can pretend that's Green. Or just troughers make money flogging carbon credits to cover the whole journey. Air volume doesn't really matter because neither CO2 nor 'global warming' respects lines drawn on a map.

This is also how we end up with Drax burning north american wood pellets.

"Or we dig it up here and the journey is shorter."

But if we dig it up here people will see it being dug up and get freaked out. What he eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over.

Worse, the datacentres have their own OCGTs and/or Diesel (which are afaik not counted in the overall generation reporting). We may end up in a situation where datacentres act as a "flexible load" by falling back to local gas generation when the grid is short on renewable power.

The trouble with that is, datacentres being so huge, have a [1]very destabilising effect on local distribution networks - they trip over to backup generation at the slightest sniff of a voltage dip or spike, and they do it en-masse, which can cause localised blackouts.

On top of that, they are constant-power loads, which means that if the voltage dips slightly and they stay on the grid, their current draw rises by the same proportion. That would also be bad news for distribution network operators, and it's a pet theory of mine that the [2]Heathrow debacle may have been caused/contributed to by the concentration of datacentres in West London. (a rapidly changing localised load puts a strain on Automatic Voltage Regulation, whereby a control system at the substation moves a tap on an autotransformer to keep the voltage stable, but too much movement of that tapchanger causes arcs which can contaminate the insulating oil and prematurely age the transformer, leading to an explosion if the insulation breaks down completely)

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/big-techs-data-center-boom-poses-new-risk-us-grid-operators-2025-03-19/

[2] https://watt-logic.com/2025/03/24/heathrow-airport-blackout/

Militwit will probably tell them to pray harder to the sky gods to fart in their general direction. Energy generation isnt his priority, green madness is. Energy generation will only become the priority when it is so politically damaging to carry on pursuing ideology over reality.

Yep. So-

In a recent report, it noted that "UK industrial electricity prices at 25.85p/kWh are the highest of the 28 countries covered by the IEA report...

...We asked Ed Miliband's office, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) what measures, if any, it intended to take to alleviate this, but we have yet to receive a response.

And-

Another area of concern will be promoting sustainability and the use of renewable energy solutions.

Millibrain has never been good at cause & effect, and DESNeeZ got a CEO from the 'renewables' lobby and a mission change to promote 'renewables' rather than reduce costs and improve energy security. But a modest proposal would be to build a 'renewable' pilot datacentre. It'll be fine-

https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind

minimum: 0.412 GW maximum: 13.85 GW average: 6.552 GW

An 'AI' datacentre should be smart enough to turn off power to enough racks when the wind drops. I mean it's not like they really need to operate at full power, 24x7x365. Then again, both the general public and industry are starting to realise that Millibrain's energy policy is why energy costs are so high, why 'Net Zero' really means shrinking the UK economy to 1990 levels, and reducing energy prices to 1990 levels would be rather more beneficial.

Plus is a bit of bubble-on-bubble thinking, with the combination of an AI bubble meeting the 'renewables' bubble leading to both bursting.

(with perhaps a touch of sarcasm regarding how the Militwittish one plans on handling this one...)

Nope - we already know how, if you'd paid attention.

Remember this big push for EV's? They come with this neat little feature where you plug them in and they act like battery storage.

That's how the datacentres get power: People plugging their mobile battery storage into the grid. (You thought you were charging your EV? Nope, you're supplying power to the grid. I know... you only plug in your EV when it needs charge, but if it's plugged in and partly charged when the Grid decides it needs the power back...).

(and that's the end of the light sarcasm response).

The other way is something the government was pushing a while back: Making Datacentres a priority for power, combined with plans on rolling brownouts when demand exceeds supply. Allegedly datacentres should also be at least partly self-powering via wind and solar onsite, but I've lost track as to how far that's got.

Allegedly datacentres should also be at least partly self-powering via wind and solar onsite, but I've lost track as to how far that's got

Artists impressions, and accountants running cost vs subsidy calculations probably. But would be the usual problem with solar that could be guesstimated based on roof area and W/m^2 from panels plonked on it. And then what to do for power overnight when heating, cooking, vehicle charging etc etc would increase demand on the grid.

We are, supposedly, trying to decarbonise our energy use. This means using electricity to replace other fuels. The most important of these are heating and cars.

Can we find anything left in the power generation budget that is left over for AI ?

UK government were talking about making datacentres (and hence AI) a higher priority to such things as heating and transport. So if that's how it goes, we're not looking at finding leftover energy for AI, but for heating homes and powering vehicles.

Off-grid home power production is looking really attractive now. On grid (the normal installs of solar/wind with batteries) runs the risk of your home storage being tapped when you actually need the power yourself, leaving you short.

The heat generated by all those GPUs could very easily heat homes and businesses. This would be an improvement over the ChatGPT action figures that seem to have taken over the Internet in the last couple of days.

Looks like the pace they are going they will be able avoid building any AI datacentres as the bubble will have burst, yet naturally will have enjoyed a nice little jolly at someone else’s expense.

Despite all the evidence suggesting otherwise.

I reckon huge developments like the Botley West solar farm in Oxfordshire will be rushed through and sod the consequences. Thought it was for houses? Nah mate, data centres. Then we have projects like the massive reservoir near Abingdon.

Earmarked as a fresh water supply for the Home Counties it’s also going to be convenient for data farms.

Everything is going according to plan in the UK, big business building infrastructure for … big business.

Sod the nimbys

We need lots of hamsters.