Data demands
The explosion of artificial intelligence has brought with it a new power demand challenge. How big could that demand get and what can be done to prepare for it?
By Greg Pitcher, features writer
Data demands
The explosion of artificial intelligence has brought with it a new power demand challenge. How big could that demand get and what can be done to prepare for it?
By Greg Pitcher, features writer
If power networks thought the past 10 years were difficult, they should brace for the next decade, warns Gopal Ramchurn, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton.
He believes the challenges faced when connecting burgeoning numbers of renewable energy sources to the grid will soon appear as a molehill in the rearview mirror as the UK's thirst for advanced computing technology creates a mountain on the road ahead.
"The problem is going to get more complicated for network managers," says Ramchurn. "They were quite overwhelmed in the past 10 years when the solar explosion happened. We're going to see the same thing on the demand side now with data centres, and suddenly that's a much more serious problem. Meeting demand is much harder than managing excess supply."
These power-hungry technology hubs, essentially large sheds full of advanced computing kit used to run the systems required by artificial intelligence and a range of applications and programmes, are becoming vital for a growing number of operations.
"If you turn off data centres, you're shutting off so many businesses, the economic impacts are much, much bigger than when you restrict supply," says Ramchurn.
Leaving the tech hubs running could also be unpalatable, he warns. "If data centres are eating all the power, you might have to shut down local communities or increase energy prices to get you other sources of energy."
Estimated current demand of the tech sector in the UK.
The predicted demand of the tech sector in the UK by 2040.
Power hungry tech sheds
A study published by Aurora Energy Research in June this year lays bare the challenge facing the networks. It says connecting a substation to a 100MW "hyperscale" data centre – a massive facility generally used to serve a household-name technology giant's own needs – is equivalent to linking in more than a quarter of a million homes.
The government has set its sights on a fresh generation of tech sheds to fuel a “revolution” outlined in an AI Opportunities Action Plan earlier this year. "Our transformative planning reforms will make it easier to build the data centres that are the engines of the AI age," says technology secretary Peter Kyle in that report.
Aurora predicts that the sector’s power demand could soar from about 12TWh this year to as much as 50TWh by 2040, by which point it could represent almost a sixth of Britain's overall energy needs.
A report from the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) published in February notes the impact of this growth on utilities.
"The consumption of energy, water and critical materials attributable to the lifecycles of AI systems and services has been steadily increasing in recent years – and is projected to increase further," says the study, which Ramchurn contributed to. "In the case of electricity consumption, some of the top-end estimates suggest that energy demand from AI could outstrip renewable generation capacity in some jurisdictions within the next 10 years."
Ramchurn, also chief executive of the government-funded Responsible AI UK programme, says there could yet be a step change in the uptake of the most advanced computing technology.
"We are expanding the range of applications we are applying AI to, but we are yet to see the killer app,” he warns. “There is lots of fancy stuff you can do, and it's all good fun, but are these going to stay for the long term?
“It is still on the hype curve to some extent. It's only going to grow so you need more data centres to run it and they need to be fitted with the latest graphics processing units (GPUs)."
This requires ever more power to run the systems that drive the technology, Ramchurn says, as well as fluid to cool them. "Your local communities are competing for water, competing for energy, as we've seen in Ireland."
The Irish Government set out new rules for data centre development in 2022 after a surge of interest from tech firms in the country. “In the short term, there is only limited capacity for further data centre development as the key state bodies, regulators and the electricity sector work to upgrade our infrastructure,” according to Irish ministers.
AI is evolving
Ramchurn calls for utility networks to work closely with data centres to help solve the challenges each are causing for the other.
"The grid has to cope with the need for more renewable generation capacity across the grid while at the same time, data centres need reliable power,” he says. "We are pushing for net zero. We want more solar, more hydro, more wind energy but we need more stable power for data centres. How do we get that to work?"
"Right now there's no coordination between the source of energy and the consumer of it. We need more communication and more coordinated planning.”
He calls for data centres to report more information on their location, sources of energy and water; and for networks to provide more consistent real-time insight into their generation loads, so the two can be brought together. “Making demand follow supply is the dream of the future smart grids,” says Ramchurn.
Everett Thompson, chief executive of US-based data centre developer WiredRE, says that as AI is evolving, the technology is becoming cleverer and thus less water and power dependent.
"When I started in the industry in 2000, for every one unit of useful chip-based work in energy per kilowatt hour, you would get one unit of a deep parasitic load purely for things like dealing with the heat removal or the lights," he says.
"Now the data centres are far more efficient, and that parasitic load can be less than 15 per cent. They are using chip technologies, passive cooling systems and also moving to more temperate climates."
This last element doesn't bode as well for the UK power grid, and indeed weather is cited as one of several factors driving the interest in neighbouring Ireland.
“There’s no coordination between the source of energy and the consumer of it. We need more communication and more coordinated planning.”
Gopal Ramchurn, professor of AI at the University of Southampton
Best-laid plans
As the market becomes more crowded, and the demands on the networks increase, Thompson says developers are taking matters into their own hands.
"You need to be looking at on-site generation or self-generation," he says. "At some point that's going to be required because communities do not want data centres taking their renewable power."
Rather than a problem, however, Thompson sees a big opportunity for the UK to restructure its infrastructure.
"Facebook built a small data centre in Prineville, Oregon, a town which only had 10,000 people, but now is getting all kinds of utility taxes that it is able to put to community use,” he says.
"There are a lot of examples of fallow plants, such as paper mills or steel mills, that are being converted to productive use as data centres. Right now, my strong advocacy is for communities to really plan ahead and think about how they can take advantage of this economic development for broader use, because it's here to stay.”
Thompson says developers can oversize their own renewable power sites to send power back into the grid to the benefit of the local community. “That's got to be a public-private partnership where the community says, 'this is what we want'.”
He believes power networks and data centre developers should be working together alongside local and central government to build holistic strategies. "There are many tools today that allow you to see where the growth is and then with a little bit of participation from the private sector plan where the next industrial hub needs to be, and then overlay that on things like the national railway and other things, so that it's accretive to the public good. That's really the opportunity here.”
Tipping point
Thompson says the explosion in data centres is only just beginning.
"We've hit the tipping point. Before, probably 2023, this was IT related and you could still manage it through the cloud or on a suburban industrial park. But that's not what's happening now.
“These are truly industrial scale developments, every bit as large as a power plant that's serving these cities, and that's not going to change. It's like memory. It's going to be more and more and so now is the time to map this to public infrastructure and ensure that it's integrating in the same direction."
Innovation is already happening. Data centre developer CyrusOne has teamed up with Eon Energy Infrastructure (EIS) to deliver local power solutions to data centres. The pair's first initiative will see EIS to design a local power generation system, named Eon IQ Energy Center, to supply CyrusOne FRA7, a hyperscale data center in Griesheim, Germany.
This local power generation system will deliver an additional 61MW of electrical output to the facility by 2029. Eon Energy Infrastructure chief executive Marten Bunnemann says the pilot scheme "has strong potential to create a blueprint for the UK market".
"By decoupling data centre growth from grid constraints, local energy generation can dramatically reduce time to power – delivering reliable capacity within approximately three years," he adds. "It empowers customers to design their data centres based on optimal performance, not limited by grid availability. If applied in the UK, this approach could enable faster growth to meet demand for AI and cloud services and bring knock-on benefits to the wider economy.”
