Executive Summary

• More than 100 UK data centres request gas connections instead of waiting years for a grid connection.
• This amounts to more than 15 TW hours of energy each year, which is enough power to power up London for over four months.
• Concerns are circling the industry over climate pledges; can the UK have its cake and eat it? Can they have their AI boom and be a major player in this race, as well as meet Net Zero?

On Monday, the Guardian published an article stating that more than 100 UK data centres request gas connections and are planning to use fossil fuel as an alternative to waiting multiple years for a grid connection. For the environmentally conscious who want to reach sustainability targets, this feels like a slap in the face that companies are applying for gas connections.

We all know AI has exploded onto the scene, demanding all the power, and AI infrastructure requires a lot more power than traditional facilities, and this is the reason behind requesting gas connections. Data centres already consume around 6% of the UK’s electrical supply, projected to rise fourfold by 2030.

Future Energy Networks, which represents the UK’s natural gas suppliers, stated they received more than 100 requests for gas connections in the past two years from data centre operators specifically. It amounts to more than 15 TW hours of energy each year, which is enough power to power up London for over four months. And what’s more alarming is that they’re requesting this as a permanent solution, moving away from the ideals of gas as a temporary fallback or backup.

A threat to the UK’s climate goals

Not only is this a policy headache turning into a migraine, but it threatens to reach the climate targets we set in place. The “Clean Power 2030” target states that less than 5% of electricity should come from fossil fuels, and this backwards moment to source alternative power solutions could derail this entirely.

Not only this, with a lack of accurate reporting, developers are underestimating the impact new facilities will have on the environment, the industry and the community. For example, Google, who want to build two huge data centres in Thurrock and North Weald in Essex, respectively, have significantly misstated how much carbon they would contribute to the UK’s emissions. They compared one year of predicted emissions with the UK’s entire five-year carbon budget, severely understating the significance of their emissions, states Foxglove, a tech justice nonprofit.

It’s not just Google, though, they are an example of a pile-up of faulty estimates and calculations around AI development and its carbon impact, that will jeopardise the chances of meeting the carbon pledges we’ve made.

How can we address climate targets?

It’s less about using the fancy sustainability buzzwords in 2026 and is leaning towards this major concern: can the UK have its cake and eat it? Can they have their AI boom and be a major player in this race, as well as meet Net Zero?

It’s a complex, nuanced answer with no definitive consensus, with many companies and regulators innovating and aggressively reforming how things work so we can have our chocolate fudge cake.

Ofgem and other regulators are reforming the grid queue, fast-tracking viable projects and getting rid of ones clogging up the gridlocked capacity. Innovators and leaders in the sector are creating new ways to use renewable energies to fully power facilities and operators are tightening their belts on capacity and freeing up existing, stranded capacity in their facilities, whilst strictly attempting to remain as efficient as possible.

The point of this article isn’t to condemn those operators turning to gas; they don’t want to violate the green pledges, but they know the UK’s grid cannot deliver the power needed to keep up with the speed of technological innovation. There is more happening behind the scenes in an attempt to offset carbon footprint and it really is a race against time, as we sit on the edges of our seats to see what happens next.