We tried to get some more power capacity for our own bit barn (Tiny compared to the major players) and the grid told us "No chance".

Moving everything to the cloud was a good thing?

Concentrating all that processing into a few large... no make that Giga centres instead of it being on-premises and distributed all over the place wasn't such a good idea now, was it?

Still, it made a lot of people a shed load of money. Those people are probably sitting on their private islands (complete with wind and solar power) and raising a glass to all the suckers who funded their retirement.

Cynical? you bet.

If everyone had on-site equipment rather than off-site, then a LOT more power would be used overall in the UK (more seperate air-con units, single servers rather than large virtual servers/vhosting, and all power consumption would be in the UK rather than some in foreign DCs).

Considering we're going to go through a massive energy crisis before 2025 (when the last remaining coal stations and the last of 8 reactors go offline), then it's probably a good idea we used UK datacentres (and a vast amount shipped off to DCs in other countries).

So this is a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand yes, the use of cloud provision rather than self-hosting or colocation is likely to be massively more efficient and thus generally a good thing for efficiency and climate impact.

The issue is potentially one of induced demand. The key value prop of cloud is that it practically eliminates barriers to entry. Coupled with the fact cloud providers don't really make it easy to do things like set consumption limits, and I'd be willing to bet that while the per-unit efficiency is miles better, cloud computing is enabling us to use way more units than we had ever thought possible. It's now perfectly normal for small companies of 5-10 people to be running fleets of tens of thousands of hosts and hundreds of thousands of cores spooling up and down on demand. That simply was not feasible a decade ago.

Right now we're not doing a good job of ensuring that the induced demand is worth the impact. There's a good discussion to be had around whether we even should - cloud works best when it's a neutral utility, not an arbiter of value or impact.

Centralised infrastructure will almost certainly use less power than decentralised infrastructure. Especially if you can keep the utilisation of that kit at 90%+ by selling it to multiple customers.

It's not as if anyone will be able to afford electricity by the time they're finished.

Datacenters bring much more tax profit, so it's preferable to reserve the available real estate for datacenters and similar structures. What would you prefer to have on your area: A dozen quiet, clean, rich datacenters minding their own business, or 10-20 thousand unruly humans demanding all kind of services?

The problem seems to be power distribution capacity rather then generation. Given that it's easier to move data than power we should see data centres clustered round power stations. That would include the landing points of the off-shore wind farms.

It's not too difficult to envisage trade-offs - housing developers buying a data centre's power allocation when it moves.

Wind farms are not constant suppliers - in calm weather they consume rather than produce electricity and data centers need a constant supply.

A better option would be to require data centers to generate their own electricity thereby removing their load from the grid.

Some of these perhaps?

[1]arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/us-regulators-will-certify-first-small-nuclear-reactor-design/

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/us-regulators-will-certify-first-small-nuclear-reactor-design/

The off-shore ones are more reliable. They also have a good connection to the grid so that a data centre close to the landfall is going to have a reliable supply even if the wind isn't blowing much off-shore.

The problem is NIMBYs don't want pylons to bring the power across land from the windfarm landfall.

I bet they wouldn't want data centres either.

But I guarantee they don't want to pay the significantly higher cost of buried cables - and would almost all object to them being buried on "their land".

It's pretty much a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.

The issue with that is a lot of people want easy access to their DC (even though visits tend to be pretty rare), so that would cross off using it for co-lo etc. The other issue might be a lack of skilled staff in those areas. But yeah apart from that it would make a lot more sense.

Sometimes you just have to move to where the work is. I've done that a few times, It was pure good luck I ended up back where I started.

a lot of people want easy access to their DC

They can just hop into their electric vehicles and go there if they're within range...

Or they could change from venting excess heat to piping it into a communal heating project? Has been proposed in hospitals to help heat wards where they had server rooms, and some businesses have looked into it, too. Not so good during the hot summers, but during the winter: Win!

Or use the generated heat to generate power to help offset the draw from the grid? Again, something that was considered as a cost saving exercise.

The one thing holding it back? Initial cost.

Now if it were made into a requirement then we might see faster adoption of such technologies, not just a reliance on external supply.

"The one thing holding it back? Initial cost."

If the politicians could just take some time from slugging it out with each other to look at what's important they might get round to some form of tax incentives - positive and negative to push people into it.

take some time from slugging it out with each other

Politics is now a game of competitive fantasy. It's imperative that reality is kept at bay so no-one notices that everything around them is shit. Literally, in the case of the waterways. Distraction is the only thing that's important.

There are plenty of circumstances where low grade heat is useful all year round, the most obvious is public swimming pools which cost a fortune to keep warm but there's many more such as industrial laundries who always need plenty of hot water.

When I've come across issues with a lack of power or limits on power it has generally been down to the distribution network not an absolute lack of power. It seems the distribution companies don't like to upgrade and when forced try to push the costs to the end user.

At one point around 10 years ago in Suffolk both Felixstowe Docks and BT's Adastral Park were running large gas turbine generators as the could get gas but not the electricity required. Sizewell B & the large off-shore wind farms there all connect to Ipswich area so shouldn't have been an issue.

Felixstowe docks in the end paid for a new cable along the A14 through the Orwell Bridge from the super grid station near Ipswich to the docks. BT looked at connecting to that too, but went a different route...

If you look just by the A12/A14 junction south of Adastral Park you will see a Solar farm which is plugged into the overhead lines that run straight into the back of their site. I think there is a second farm closer to their site now too. As they tend to need more power during the day it works providing the capacity they were getting from gas.

Both the docks area and Adastral Park have long term plans which shows the need for more power, but the distribution network was happy to do nothing.

Felixstowe docks in the end paid for a new cable along the A14 through the Orwell Bridge from the super grid station near Ipswich to the docks. BT looked at connecting to that too, but went a different route...

Oh, I remember that, and got an opportunity to walk through the inside of the Orwell Bridge. We'd been looking at building a datacentre on the old Cranes (or RS&J?) site because their closure, along with I think a Fisons chemical production plant had left a large power surplus. Plus there's fibre routes coming down the A12 from landings around Aldeburgh and Leiston.

Challenge was getting wayleaves through the bridge, and ISTR the job you mention ending up mole drilling under the Orwell instead. It's one of life's little challenges in telecomms, dealing with river and bridge crossings. But idea was to link in to existing routes towards London and mainland Europe. East Anglia's one of those fun destinations where diversity/resilience got expensive given the reliance on the A12, and lack of infrastructure to create loops. So diversity in Ipswich* generally meant one leg towards London, the other up to Norwich and finding a cross-country route.

But the land ended up being flogged off to housing developers, and the idea was canned.

*Spike Milligan once described Ipswich as the land of the living dead. The local newspaper moaned about that for a few years, thus proving it's point. Then again, I did get to see bands like AC/DC playing there as a kid, which may or may not explain my tinnitus.

Just a coincidence or both London and Washington DC having massive datacenter power consumption issues. We may soon be hearing about other capital cities having similar issues. Realtime data analysis for the snoops to report to their bosses is the reason for the locations at the capital cities. There is also the odd fetish of certain corporations having their HQs or secondary HQs in the capital which may also not be coincidental.

Now, how to solve the issue of going 100% electric vehicles in short time frames? I have heard of DC outskirt commutes where from the highway you can see your destination and probably walk there in 10 minutes, but still have at least half an hour of car travel, probably an exaggeration. So for the electric vehicle not so much a range issue, but an endurance issue for occupant comfort. And, will there be enough electricity available to charge at the destination? Remember, us 'mericans just don't do mass transit, must have our own means of vehicular freedom.

>Realtime data analysis for the snoops to report to their bosses is the reason for the locations at the capital cities.

In the case of the UK this is total nonsense. UK data centres are up the M40 because that's where the cables are and because at the end of that road you have a little known airport called Heathrow and just a few more miles into the M25 the biggest financial centre on the planet.

"London" in this sense is being used _very_ loosely.

Similarly situated, even the relative proximity to capital city international airports. Municipal boundaries are of little consequence to the power supply, the data centres, the snoops' HQs, etc. Areas like these are regions named for their influential city. Plenty of examples worldwide even scaled down to populated areas less than 10,000 people.

On significant difference, the largest US financial centre in NYC is too far to share data centres with the DC region.

Also, Britain's snoops are in a town called Cheltenham (although I don't discount them having facilities at various key exchanges around the UK - but Jacob Rees-Mogg has most likely seen to it that any government-owned London estate has been sold off to his mates whilst muttering something about "efficiency").

The NSA likewise famously have their big black box in Maryland (by Fort Meade, the Integrated Cyber Centre and Defense Information Systems Agency) along with another DC in Utah.

Whilst those bit barns no doubt have a substantial IT Demand, I doubt that (in the broader scheme of things) either of these are imposing any great demand on the DC power grid.

If the electricity supply gets eaten up by the cloud, then you won't be able to access Netflix and Office 365 from your home and office as there'll be no electricity there. If the power goes to your home and office instead, there'll be no electricity to run the Netflix and Office 365 clouds.

With the push to move away from fossil fuels and the promotion of EV's as the solution, the issue of infrastructure for charging EV's was already on the table. Now it makes sense: Datacentres have taken all the power so there's not enough capacity to boil a kettle, let alone charge a car! And with Datacentres, it's a 24 hour draw, too.

Makes you wonder if anyone had actually sat down and thought this through (Hmm... Government + Thinking? Not a hope!)

Guess Londoners will have to swap to bikes instead: Forget EV's for now.

And yet National Grid still claims that it can easily meet the needs of EV charging stations, even though the numbers always made that seem doubtful even without the DC demand. Someone's telling porkies.

Don't forget that there are two entities involved here - National Grid is responsible for the "big" stuff - the 400kV, 275kV, interconnects and such. I suspect that the capacity problems here are down to the Distribution Network Operator, of which there are several across the UK with the one responsible for the Heathrow, Ealing etc. area being (I believe) UK Power Networks - it looks as if their boundary finishes at the M25 with Scottish & Southern westward of that.

DNOs are responsible for connections to businesses and homes and most of the substations and transformers you see locally, so while National Grid may well be able to shovel electrons around the country perfectly sufficiently, if the local transformer is undersized for the demand, or the underground 11kV and 415V cables need uprating, it's not really their problem.

The thing works the other way too, I recently met a very interesting local enterprise which takes the council's compostable waste, turns it into biogas and generates 2x 500kW (IIRC) from that, day and night. They are connected to their local DNO and cannot expand because the DNO's local network couldn't cope. In order to expand they would need to run a cable to the local National Grid substation, which is prohibitively expensive in their current plans. An alternative they are considering is to feed some excess gas into the gas network, which is apparently slightly closer to hand and has a bit of spare capacity.

M.

Most EV charging is done at home (or at least to date). I charge my EV at home between the hours of 01:00 and 05:00. New regulations have been introduced to limit the leap in demand from thousands and thousands of people like me doing it all at the same time. Now the charger will randomly delay the start of charge to level out the demand.

I also charge my EV directly from the output of my PV array when the sun is out. Zero grid demand there.

As an aside, because I also have 33kWh of home battery storage, the PV output keeps them topped up at this time of year. Last month I used the grand total of 12kWh of grid power to run my home. That does not include any EV charging, which took 96.3kWh, but it shows what can be done by individuals.

For decades the UK has been restricting and reducing the size of the population whilst freely allowing new generating capacity to be built, so how can it have come to this?

What? The opposite of that? Oh!

Well, in their defense the whole world has done just the same. It's the good old "we'll find a solution when it happens" carelessness optimism.

Also the population increases all on itself (the only country having tried to do something about that gave up eventually AFAIK), and generating additional capacity is a financial no-no: Building new capacity costs money, making your old investment pay for itself as long as possible creates profit, so you'd try to hold out for as long as possible.

Given that councils are required to have at least five years of housing planned, and some have more, why have the electricity planners apparently not taken this into account when allowing the data centres to be built? i.e. it's not news that more houses need to be built, so why haven't electricity generation and distribution plans accounted for that?

One those three councils, Ealing, hasn't published their strategy for some years. This makes no difference because they'll continue rubber-stamping 20+ storey blocks of flats on the understanding that no-one tells the far-eastern off-plan investors that all those lucrative buy-to-lets alongside the lizcrosspurp line will lie empty for years after the sales have been banked because they can't connect the power.

Why should the electricity planners be any different.

The council might be required to publish their 5 year plan for building new houses but even other departments in the same council don't act on the plan. They're only just starting to put the schools in place for the houses they built decades ago and they're not doing anything about road planning or even making sure that there is a safe way for the kids to cross the roads to get to the new school from the existing housing.

Brewery..

If London's capacity is already stretched too thin, how do they plan to feed the EVs they are advocating?

I guess with the same capacity and a little three-card Monte: "We produce (let's say) 100 kW, this means datacenters can use 100 kW, which leaves 100 kW to charge EVs, and with the remaining 100 kW people can run their appliances at home."

Advanced mathematics for politically active people: You forgot the 100 kW for lighting up the sky and the 100 kW for the (hungry) games. Then you have the 100 kW for your bicycles and the 100 kW allocated to the Pub (important).

Then you still have 100 kW left... where to use all that power...

If London's capacity is already stretched too thin, how do they plan to feed the EVs they are advocating?

Not advocating, legislating. So all the Climate Change Act and Net Zero bollox. ICEs will be banned, along with gas for commercial and residential heating and cooking. Energy demand will triple, and it's all going to be someone else's problem.

So it'll be excellent news for our privatised utilities and strap-ons like National Grid, the 'Energy System Operator' and the 'renewables' lobby. Thousands more windmills will be 'needed', and acres of farmland covered over with solar panels.

In a nationalised world, politicians would have more levers, ie could look at parts of the UK with available power and try to incentivise large energy users settling there. Currently it's all a collosal mess where rather than having power generation close to demand, we're moving it further offshore.

Why they don't mandate that say all 2+ bedroom houses must have solar panels installed.

Doing as they are built is a fraction of the cost of retrofitting.

> Why they don't mandate that say all 2+ bedroom houses must have solar panels installed.

I guess suburbia housing isn't the biggest issue, apartment buildings are, and a city is mostly apartment (and office) buildings.

One house = one family, while one apartment building = dozens of families and a tiny (usually already crowded) roof. Not to mention shadowing from neighborhood high rises. Sorry, solar roofs don't work where they would be needed most.

while one apartment building = dozens of families and a tiny (usually already crowded) roof. Not to mention shadowing from neighborhood high rises. Sorry, solar roofs don't work where they would be needed most.

Still quite a large (vertical) surface area though. I wonder what the practicalities of hanging solar panels on the south facing wall of a tower block (e.g. as part of a cladding system) would be. Naturally, they'd lose some efficiency (unless you could tilt them out, giving the building a saw-tooth look), but there's a lot of urban real-estate on a conventional (not all-glass) tower block. Even in urban areas, tall developments could panel the top few floors which get full-sun, even if they just use conventional cladding for lower floors which get shaded. Might reduce solar heating of the building at the same time.

Conventional panels of course are quite heavy, but thin-film systems exist. I'm sure some material-science bods could come up with a way of applying thin-film PV layers to a (non-flammable, ahem) cladding panel. The cladding system itself could then have that saw-tooth shape to angle the PV surface a bit more sky-wards.

What's key with high density housing of course really is to leverage that density into centralised utilities - a central GS heat-pump (or district heating) which supplies every apartment - not individual boilers or anything ridiculous like that.

one apartment building = dozens of families and a tiny (usually already crowded) roof

Let me see now .. solar panels benefits the block tenants, so no money to made there. Lots of phone masts looking like a metal porcupine = a steady stream of money for the block owner. As usual, it's down to dirty money.

Or even make it easier for people with existing houses to fit solar panels. Above a certain capacity you have to have the OK from the local electricity lot and they can take months to OK schemes.

This can't be a surprise. Power companies, councils and the government all have a good view of the grid's capacity and surely should have regulated the creation of large power grants.

This all sounds like a planning failure and a failure to build the needed infrastructure in those areas, or to regulate the construction of datacenters. After all they granted permission for all of them.

Is the issue that there is not enough power, or is the problem that we cannot get enough power to where its needed using the available infrastructure.

These are two distinct issues... Capacity of the generation or capacity of the grid? Speed or bandwidth, but with leccy..?

It's a distribution issue. We generate enough but the local infrastructure (so the bit outside the remit of the National Grid) can't handle it.

Let them use candles.