Ofgem Says 315 Data Centres Want Twice Britain's Power
Photo: A transmission pylon on the British grid — the network Ofgem says is being clogged by speculative data centre applications. Credit: Trevor Littlewood / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0). Britain has a simple problem with its AI ambitions: there is no plug. Tech firms have asked for 73 gigawatts of grid connections for planned AI data centres, according to energy watchdog Ofgem — run flat out, those sites would guzzle 639 terawatt-hours a year, almost double the 323 TWh the whole country consumed in 2025. And in Liverpool this week, ministers responded to the most alarming energy numbers in a generation by ordering everyone to build faster. Welcome to the strangest collision in British politics: the government says "go", the grid says "no", and the country's biggest industrial bet of the decade is being decided by a connection queue that is two-thirds fantasy. The queue that ate the grid The figures, first reported by The Sun on October 3, come f...