Finite Resources Could Cause a Data Centre Crunch in 2026

The UK needs to start with some simple steps.  Most training starts at college but a college tutor for electrical work gets paid far less than if they are working as an Electrician.  Granted the tutor get sick pay and substatial holiday and pension which a self employed house basher does not but the fact still remains.  To train the next generation of Electrician you need Electrical tutors and to get those the industry needs to pay a better salary.  

Data centres need to find better ways to convert the heat produced back into usable energy while remaining 99.999% uptime.  99.999% uptime (known as "five nines") means a system is perfectly operational 99.999% of the time. Over a full 365-day year, this allows for a total of only 5 minutes and 15 seconds of downtime

Data centres need to find better ways to convert the heat produced back into usable energy

Well there is at least one instance of a new data centre which intends feeding its excess heat into a district heating scheme - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7p21599zgo

The heat "energy centre" is already under construction - https://1energy.uk/networks/bradford-energy-network/  

- Andy.

That’s a great example. Reusing waste heat from data centres through district heating schemes could help address one of the sector’s biggest challenge energy efficiency.

Projects like the Bradford Energy Network show how data centres can contribute to local communities by supplying excess heat to homes and businesses, rather than letting it go to waste. As demand for data centres grows, I think more developments should incorporate this type of circular energy approach alongside renewable power generation and grid upgrades.

Innovations like these will be important if the UK is to expand its digital infrastructure in a sustainable way.

They could also wrap the data centre in solar panels to generate energy that could maybe be used to power some of the electric vehicle or connect that with the heat generated and then employ some kind of steam generator to make energy.  

The possibilities are out there, we just need the UK industry and government to look towards engineers for solutions.  These solutions should then be given some kind of tax incentive as data centres become more common place on the UK landscape

The proposed power densities are pretty extreme https://www.datacenters.com/news/ai-cooling-systems-must-support-100-kw-racks   I'm not sure that a coating of solar panels generating a few hundred watts per panel on a good day will be enough to make a dent in it.  
Lets take that 100kW per rack figure for a moment - that's the same sort of power as the transformer that supplies 25 house on each phase in a small village. For just one rack.

So, if we need to unhook a small village from the grid to supply each rack, how many fully populated towns have to go dark to power just one bit-barn full of them ? !  Is that a price we are prepared to pay for dancing cat videos and anodyne summaries of documents we dont want to read? 

Something is simply not going to happen at the scale, speed or power density people imagine, and I don't think the fraction of a giga-watt data centres will ever materialise.
What you may get is a new power station, for which the baseload is assumed to be the data-centre.

 That's not to say we should not be looking at energy recovery, district heating and so on, we absolutely should, for all new power stations.
I just  caution that there is a lot of hype and really it is quiet nuanced, and we don't want a town to lose heat due to a change of profitability of some business model that may not be right.
Mike.

Data centres are going to become more common in the UK and currently they have several issues

Planning permission

Site cooling


Making the site cooling feed into district heating could turn an issue into a revenue stream for the data center.  District heating systems would also help with planning permission


As an example this morning on Sky newse there was a piece about how a data centre was using water from the Thames to cool itself so they are currently through away the heat energy.  

www.youtube.com/watch

It also raised the question of how mush water was being used and if this could affect water levels during the summer months when excess heat build up in the data center was at peak and during the same time that people in the local area may be facing water shortages.


Looking to the future are we going to be discussing climate change/global warming (Personally I prefer the term climate change) being caused by data centres rather than from fossil fuels

Data centres are going to become more common in the UK and currently they have several issues

Planning permission

Site cooling


Making the site cooling feed into district heating could turn an issue into a revenue stream for the data center.  District heating systems would also help with planning permission


As an example this morning on Sky newse there was a piece about how a data centre was using water from the Thames to cool itself so they are currently through away the heat energy.  

www.youtube.com/watch

It also raised the question of how mush water was being used and if this could affect water levels during the summer months when excess heat build up in the data center was at peak and during the same time that people in the local area may be facing water shortages.


Looking to the future are we going to be discussing climate change/global warming (Personally I prefer the term climate change) being caused by data centres rather than from fossil fuels