The rapid growth of data centres is delaying new homes in London (bbc.com)

The map of planned data centers shows how badly the UK needs to split its single pricing zone for electricity.

There should be more incentive to build data centers in the north, where there is plenty of renewable power but limited capacity to transport that power south.

Germany also has a single pricing zone and a similar north/south problem. It causes expensive curtailment and redispatch operations whenever the grid cannot physically transport the power from north to south the way it was traded.

Once the bubble pops, maybe they can be converted into homes?

It is truly embarrassing the lengths the UK will go to avoid simply generating more electricity.

London has had a housing crisis long before anyone ever dreamed of an LLM.

Thanks god we're getting rid of nuclear energy btw.

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Very much doubt this has anything to do with datacenters

London is just slow and bureaucratic af

The UK has very expensive electricity. Nobody builds a data center in the UK unless they need to for regulatory reasons or they got some grant conditional on it being in the UK.

Huge power hungry GPU farms for AI training will end up built elsewhere...

Electricity use in the UK peaked in around 2004, and has since been declining. Per capita use is steeply down, but total usage is still 16% down.

That means most grid infrastructure is now under utilised, and skills needed to build any new grid have dried up.

Presumably there are still a few pockets that are at capacity, and that's where the problem lies.