New Homes In London Were Delayed By 'Energy-Hungry' Data Centers (bbc.com)
- Reference: 0180280645
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/04/0449221/new-homes-in-london-were-delayed-by-energy-hungry-data-centers
- Source link: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0mpr1mvwj3o
> According to [2]the report (PDF) from the London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee, some new housing developments in west London were temporarily delayed after the electricity grid reached full capacity. The committee's chair James Small-Edwards said energy capacity had become a "real constraint" on housing and economic growth in the city.
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> In 2022, the General London Assembly (GLA) began to investigate delays to housing developments in the boroughs of Ealing, Hillingdon and Hounslow - after it received reports that completed projects were being told they would have to "wait until 2037" to get a connection to the electricity grid. There were fears the boroughs may have to "pause new housing altogether" until the issue was resolved. But the GLA found short-term fixes with the National Grid and energy regulator Ofgem to ensure the "worst-case scenario" did not happen -- though several projects were still set back. The strains on parts of London's housing highlighted the need for "longer term planning" around grid capacity in the future, said the report.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0mpr1mvwj3o
[2] https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-12/Planning%20Regeneration%20Committee%20-%20Energy%20Infrastructure%20Report%20FINAL.pdf
Two main issues not highlighted (Score:3)
First, the UK has a major problem in that their only large metropolis is London. London is a huge city about the size of New York,just under 10 million people. The UK's next largest is Manchester, which is under 3 million. The UK got two more with more than 1 million, but that's it. Much of England is rural. With so much concentrated around London, power becomes a major issue.
Secondly, the grid is more of a problem than the power plants. In a large metropolis It is often easier to create a power plant on a set area than it is to send the electricity to the individual houses. The grid of transmission wires is usually near capacity on a city that is growing, so you need more power lines as well as more power plants.
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> First, the UK has a major problem in that their only large metropolis is London. London is a huge city about the size of New York,just under 10 million people. The UK's next largest is Manchester, which is under 3 million. The UK got two more with more than 1 million, but that's it. Much of England is rural. With so much concentrated around London, power becomes a major issue.
> Secondly, the grid is more of a problem than the power plants. In a large metropolis It is often easier to create a power plant on a set area than it is to send the electricity to the individual houses. The grid of transmission wires is usually near capacity on a city that is growing, so you need more power lines as well as more power plants.
A data center does not require people to visit it in order to use it.
If the data center is almost justifying its own power plant, then build both of the damn things in rural dirt.
Data lines are what is needed after that to “plug in” the user community. Fiber is a hell of a lot easier to deploy than power infrastructure.
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I do not want a data-center/power-plant on MY rural dirt. I want bushy ravines supporting shootable roughed-grouse, well-tending fields of corn supporting pheasants and brookly bubbling streams of cut-throat trout and steel-heads. Fuck the *.ai people and code they rode in on.
You don't know how mad it makes me (Score:1)
You don't know how mad it makes me that the tech bros were all pushing "conserve energy! Ditch your tungsten! Go LED!"
And now all those considerable savings are evaporated, consumed by AI and their attendant datacenters.
Techbros are far worse then politicians now.
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"conserve energy! Ditch your tungsten! Go LED!" ... or the Planet will die in Hellfire!
( "you may be in a psyop when..." )
FWIW I replaced the warm white LED's in one quarter of my rooms with incandescents last week. Turns out current LED's [1]contribute to diabetes [youtu.be].
It's been 20 years since I switched to CFL's and LED's and I was genuinely surprised how different (and really good) it feels to sit under a 200W incandescent.
The crazy thing is 20 years ago my lighting usage was over 2KW for my house whereas
[1] https://youtu.be/iT8W6kaD-RA
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Maybe the monster yachts should have been your first clue?
How much is crypto mining? (Score:2)
If they want to print itchy and scratch money they should pay the full cost and go to the back of the queue.
Oh no! (Score:2)
Anyway...
Water (Score:2)
If this were a factory that needed huge amounts of water but there wasn't enough water for the factory the permit would simply be denied.
Notice how AI, datacenters, and electricity gets a special exception to the societal norms.
Partially it's the transhumanists who have a religious fervor in bringing about their AGI God, but part of it is just dumb bureaucrats who can't understand how anything, including Econ 101, works. Or they're just bribed, which happens to be a highly profitable technique.
Progress? (Score:2)
How is what we're doing now progressing humanity? We're concentrating so much of build-out to make sure we keep funneling wealth, and resources, to a select few, that we're literally neglecting entire populations of people in favor of making sure we keep funneling wealth and resources to these select few. How is this progress? How is this helping anything long term? Unless the end-goal is a lowered population due to dwindling resources, I can't see how anything we're doing as a collective society is helping
This ought to be an opportunity (Score:2)
It boggles my mind that no policy maker seems able to turn the AI demand for energy into an opportunity. Historically, where there's a surge in demand from wealthy industrial customers for a service, governments have been able to extract additional value. The obvious thing to do is to turn to the data centres owners and say "we are happy to give you grid connections, but we're going to charge you at twice the current market rate to fund infrastructure and lower bills for householders". It's such an obvious
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Nope, they are going the other way. There's a proposal to dramatically increase residential power rates, in part to fund the 'increased demand due to datacenters". They want residents to pay for stuff instead of making those poor, cash-strapped AI companies have to pay for what they are inflicting...
Fair weather friends (Score:3)
The key reason why we are seeing across the board rollback of green initiatives and green policies is that they get in the way of building more data centers. This is a beyond any doubt proof that Big Tech was only a fair weather friend for environmentalism.
Also, fundamentally, you can't build industry of any kind - be it steel production or data centers - on renewables. Manufacturing and now Big Data require stable baseload which can only be achieved by power plants. Fortunately, this will lead to revival of nuclear energy. However, until these come online, this will lead to hardship where high electricity costs will severely impact poorest.
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> Fortunately, this will lead to revival of nuclear energy. However, until these come online, this will lead to hardship where high electricity costs will severely impact poorest.
If one changes how electricity is billed, ie, the more one buys the more expensive it gets, that would help a lot. Particularly when those huge-demand customers would end up paying for the development of the very power plants that they require in the process.
Demand-surge pricing is already common in many places. I see no reason why it shouldn't be applied to industry.
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> I see no reason why it shouldn't be applied to industry.
Because it makes industry shut down and move to a different country. Just look at Germany and on-going de-industrialization after they shut down nuclear reactors.
No industry, no jobs, no real GDP growth and everyone, but rent-seeking 1%, gets poorer. So even if your electricity costs don't spike due to pricing controls, you still too poor to afford it.
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You are confusing AI with data centers. We are now in Information Age, data centers today is what electricity was to Industrial age. Just because it being wasted on AI, does not mean the entire infrastructure is worthless.
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The demand is all coming from AI data centres. We had data centres being built for years without this massive spike in demand.
Because we like industry (Score:3)
>> Fortunately, this will lead to revival of nuclear energy. However, until these come online, this will lead to hardship where high electricity costs will severely impact poorest.
> If one changes how electricity is billed, ie, the more one buys the more expensive it gets, that would help a lot. Particularly when those huge-demand customers would end up paying for the development of the very power plants that they require in the process.
> Demand-surge pricing is already common in many places. I see no reason why it shouldn't be applied to industry.
Your suggestion is logical, but I don't think you considered industrial use. That smelter or fertilizer factory will get impacted as well...distribution centers, even ice hockey rinks. Lots of industries use a lot of electricity...it's just they provide actual value, unlike this AI Rush. Most of these are the backbone of your local economy. Not everyone can be an engineer at a big tech company...someone has to make raw materials, houses, grow your food, etc
In my view, the AI bubble is a cancer we just
Re: Fair weather friends (Score:2)
Your government will not allow that. The cost of grid upgrades is being pushed onto existing customers. In my state, the utility commission approved rate hikes of 20-30% to fund data center related grid upgrades. Meanwhile generation remains flat
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There are places in America where your rate goes up with consumption. Yes.
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Not entirely true about stability. Lots of corporations develop a network of big data that can be turned on or off depending on electrical situation.
Most AI can do this. The trick is to have the tech distributed around the world. If your English AI center is short of power, you can redirect the processing to your Japanese AI center, or the Chicago one, etc.
The extra 1 second before they deliver the photo realistic picture of a certain political leader in a pink princess dress you requested does not affe
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Except geopolitics play into that, as AI data center in UK has to abide different set of regulations that one in Japan. There are also data privacy considerations, as every country's intelligence community wants a backdoor access to the data.
Re: Fair weather friends (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s worse than that. Big tech is socializing the cost of powering its AI dream onto the people it also intends to throw out of work. So, AI will take your job and you will pay for it. Your elected representatives are all in.
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Wrong. Renewables are now covering a lot. Wind doesn't stop at night, for example, and there are these things called "batteries".