Given the fairly close locations, channel the waste hot air to the Houses or Parliament and give our hard working representatives some time off.

More widely (and seriously) I think DC heat recovery is a good idea let down by the lack of a planned economy to properly make use of it. Some downsides of planned economies, of course.

Is there any merit in DC builders becoming dual businesses? e.g. build a DC with a leisure centre next to it or a greenhouse complex.

That's alright, they don't need any more time off. They're clearly not "working people" under the government's own salary-based definition of what a working person is, which means they must already have plenty of time off.

Wonder if Reeves has twigged yet that she's just described herself, the PM, the entire government, all MPs in fact, as a bunch of non-working freeloaders. As own-goals go, it's pretty spectacular.

Is there any merit in DC builders becoming dual businesses? e.g. build a DC with a leisure centre next to it or a greenhouse complex.

Consider the high margins hyperscalers make and the critical skills for success, and ask yourself what margins you think a leisure centre or soft fruit grower earn, and what their critical skills for success are. The absence of multi-billion turnover swimming pool businesses, or high latitude tomato growers is another clue that those businesses are never of sufficient scale to offer a portfolio fit with the likes of AWS. The nature of those other businesses also tells us that the value of low grade heat is pifflingly low.

It's all greenwash, I'm afraid.

I'll just leave this here: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-centre-heating/

Kinda surprised to learn how close to the top we are in terms of quantity of DCs.

Datacentre heat recovery sounds virtuous until you realise the heat comes out at around 30-35 °C - barely warm enough to dry socks, let alone heat homes. To make it useful, you need heat pumps, storage tanks, new plumbing, and the kind of public-sector coordination Britain hasn’t managed since the Romans left.

The “Innovation Hub” is another tick-box fantasy - a showroom with beanbags where politicians can have photos taken beside slogans about “the AI economy”. The “community engagement” will likely mean a fence, a security guard, and a laminated poster explaining that 97 MW of load is progress.

What’s actually happening is three more warehouses full of GPUs on a grid that already can’t keep up, swallowing the remaining local capacity while pretending to give it back as heat.

Bingo.

We can barely generate enough power to keep the lights on, certainly not enough to for everyone to have an electric car and an electric heat pump, and charge/use them when they like. Hence brain-farts like requiring EVs to support battery-to-grid, and paying people to delay their normal routines until off-peak times, for when the grid can't keep up.

Yet somehow they can find another 97MW for a data centre, in a population- and infrastructure-dense part of the country that will make building the thing way more complex and slower than necessary. And this is just one DC, with several more in the pipe.

I’m waiting for the announcements they will be closing the majors roads into the area for some years, so as to enable upgrade of the grid connections…

One of the things Colt claim on their website for this development is "International customers can also benefit from Hayes being approximately 15 minutes from London Heathrow Airport."

Presumably that's so they can fly a bucket in with a few terabytes in it, get a taxi to Hayes and pour those bits into Blightly's new AI powerhouse. Of course, this is before construction on HR3 causes fifteen years of gridlock in the locality, but I suppose Heathrow to downtown Hayes is only two and a half hours walk. Either way, transatlantic latency is going to be a bit crap, if you request a US hosted porn video and the outbound request is 180ms, but the download time is a day and a half.

Isn't that hideously disruptive and expensive?

Usually best to build the infrastructure for district heating, then build the district on top of it.

This is just green-washed virtue signalling, trying to appear to be doing something for the "greater good", while really they'll brown-out the locals when grid demand gets too high.

100% correct, based on my experience working for the UK's biggest heat networks operator, who are part of a European HQ'd group with major heat networks interests in the Nordics.

Also why permission for M25 DCs should be banned. Makes a lot more sense to build on brownfield sites where power might be more readily available, and could be combined with housing development which might then be able to utilise district heating. Downside is there's no real incentive for housing developers to spend on district heating because they just want to flog a house built as cheaply as possible and move on. Then there's also consumer protection issues, if district heating is provided as a service to reduce the risk of home owners being locked in and overcharged. But Nordics & Scandanavia seem to manage this, and even cities like NYC has some steam district heating left. Which made wandering their utilidors with a steam-detecting wand.. Interesting. If the end fell off, there was a high pressure steam leak.

Also a bit OT, but Green(ish)-

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/11/06/pay-per-mile-tax-for-evs-on-the-way/

Electric vehicle (EV) drivers will be hit with a new pay-per-mile tax in the Budget, The Telegraph can reveal.

Under current plans, to be announced by the Chancellor on Nov 26, drivers of electric cars will be charged 3p per mile on top of other road taxes.

Which is inevitable given electricity demand, plus the government losing money on fuel & VED.

In non-marketing speak:

"We are going to by the electricity we use from the grid".

Head meet tree dying at the alter of AI power generation.

Indeed, it is impossible with the UK's current power system for any grid connected system to run entirely on renewable energy. The only load that statement can be true for would be loads isolated from the grid, and where power comes solely from some local renewable power system.

Also, why the fuck allow some toss pot DC developer to build a huge extra power load on the fringes of West London? Heathrow airport have already demonstrated that the local distribution systems are sub optimal (noting the airport's culpability in that fiasco), but it's not like that part of the world is awash with power generation and excess grid capacity.

That’s OK, it’s in Hayes.

Some news item suggested that it was in Southall. That’s OK too.

For Christ sake, ANYONE but colt...

/tableflip