Britain's Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) on Tuesday signed off on a £3.4 billion project to construct an "electricity superhighway" between Scotland and Yorkshire.

Dubbed the Eastern Green Link 2 (EGL2), the majority of the 500 kilometer long cable will travel along the North Sea floor with the remaining 70 kilometers buried underground. When completed in 2029, Ofgem says the cable, the first of 26 proposed grid projects, will help to funnel clean energy from British off-shore wind farms to customers.

The upgrades come amid growing concerns over datacenters' ballooning energy demands driven in no small part by widespread deployment of AI accelerators.

In total the British energy watchdog says the transmission line will carry two gigawatts of high-voltage direct current, which will be converted back to AC by converter stations at either end. That's enough power for approximately two million homes or, alternatively, a heck of a lot of GPUs - something the nation will need if it hopes to execute on its goal of becoming an AI superpower.

Work on EGL2 is slated to kick off later this year with National Grid Networks Transmission (NGET) and Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks Transmission (SSENT) leading development.

Ofgem's approval comes just months after John Pettigrew, CEO of Britain's National Grid, predicted that datacenter power consumption was on track to grow 500 percent over the next decade.

To address this growth, Pettigrew called for the construction of an "ultra-high voltage onshore transmission network of up to 800 thousand volts." Such a grid, he suggested, would allow for bulk power transfers around the country, and create an attractive environment for AI datacenter deployments.

Access to cheap, reliable, and clean power remains one of the datacenter operators top concerns, with some going to extreme lengths to get it. Across the Irish Sea, in Dublin, Microsoft has gone so far as to construct a 170 megawatt natural gas generator to keep its datacenter campus online during grid disruptions. Meanwhile, in the US, Amazon Web Services has begun colocating datacenters alongside nuclear power stations.

The growth of generative AI is expected to drive up datacenter energy consumption. According to an International Energy Agency report from earlier this year, global datacenter energy consumption could double by 2026. But as we've previously reported, experts can't seem to agree on how quickly datacenter energy use will grow. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/14/uks_electricity_superhighway/