The AI Race Is Pressuring Utilities to Squeeze More From Europe’s Power Grids
As data center developers queue up to connect to power grids across Europe, network operators are experimenting with novel ways of clearing room for them.
European countries are racing to bring new data centers online as AI labs across the globe continue to demand more compute. The primary limiting factor is energy—and specifically, the ability to move it.
Though Europe is on track to generate enough energy, utilities experts say, grid operators broadly lack the infrastructure needed to transport it to where it needs to go. That’s throttling grid capacity and, by extension, the number of new power-hungry data centers that can connect without risking blackouts.
National Grid, which operates the transmission network in England and Wales, says that proposed data centers representing more than 30 gigawatts (GW) of power demand are awaiting connection to its grid, equal to two thirds the peak demand of Great Britain. Even accounting for the likelihood that some of those data centers will never be built, there is currently not enough room to accommodate them.
The wait for permission to plug in is causing some data center projects to collapse , undermining European ambitions to capture a share of the hundreds of billions of dollars AI labs are spending on compute. “Across Europe, projects are being cancelled because there’s no access to the grid,” claims Taco Engelaar, managing director at grid optimization company Neara.
Under pressure from government to clear the blockage, grid operators are experimenting with ways of eking additional capacity out of their existing networks—from switching the metals used in power lines, to bypassing areas of congestion, to dialing the amount of energy moving across lines up and down based on changes in weather conditions.
“There’s no one simple solution,” says Steve Smith, President at National Grid Partners, the venture capital division of National Grid. “What you have to do is a lot of everything.”
