315 Datacentres Wait for the Grid as Objections Mount
Some 315 hyperscale datacentres are queuing to connect to the national grid, and more than a hundred other planned sites intend to burn gas instead rather than wait. One contested Welsh scheme would draw up to 150MW, more than triple the demand of a city the size of Cardiff, and employ up to 125 people.
That scheme has drawn more than 1,200 planning objections, and last month the Welsh government ordered Cardiff council to pause the application while it considers taking the decision away from councillors altogether. Five of the largest new and proposed Welsh datacentres would between them consume more electricity than every home in Wales; Scotland has imposed a moratorium on new ones. The scale is visible on the ground in Newport, where a 23-metre building carries 36 air blast coolers and 60 back-up diesel generators. The politics cut across parties rather than along them: a Plaid Cymru member of the Senedd suspects the developer “could be a front for someone else: Google, Microsoft, whoever” and calls the implications for the 2040 net-zero target “massively problematic”, while a Labour councillor backing the scheme says “some of the information being spread is scaremongering”. The communities secretary has separately overturned a council decision blocking a datacentre in east London. This is the other half of the artificial intelligence package the chancellor announced this morning: the compute has to be built somewhere.