United Kingdom

4108 readers

151 users here now

General community for news/discussion in the UK.

Less serious posts should go in [email protected] or [email protected]
More serious politics should go in [email protected].

Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Data centre power use 'to surge six-fold in 10 years' due to boom in artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, National Grid predicts (www.bbc.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Chief executive John Pettigrew said the grid was becoming "constrained" and "bold action" was needed to create a network able to cope with "dramatically" growing demand.

"Future growth in foundational technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing will mean larger scale, energy-intensive computing infrastructure," Mr Pettigrew said.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

It's a little more complicated than that.

At Distribution level, there are a variety of companies that each serve a specific region. These companies own and operate the networks from LV to 132kV) WPD was brought back under UK ownership and is now called NGED - National Grid Energy Distribution - which is the only distribution operator that's a part of National Grid PLC. NGED cover south Wales and parts of England stretching east from there.

At Transmission level (132kV and above), it's owned by NGET - National Grid Energy Transmission - for England and Wales, with SPT and SSE owning the transmission infrastructure up in Scotland.

The operator is NGESO, National Grid Energy System Operator. They operate the entire transmission network of the mainland UK, covering England, Wales and Scotland. They manage generation and demand and ensure they match. Apparently they're changing their name to NESO, in line with being made fully independent of National Grid.

But yeah, all of these (including all the DNO's I didn't list) are private companies.

The bigger issue however is that our consumption market is completely detached from the generation market. With renewables taking over, our electricity should be getting much cheaper - generators no longer have any fuel costs to pay, which was always the dominant cost over the life of the plant. Instead, we get consumer sellers advertising "We use 100% renewable energy!" as if that's justification to pay a little more and go with them.