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United Kingdom Power

Too Many Servers Could Mean No New Homes In Parts of the UK (gizmodo.com) 133

Posted by BeauHD from the data-is-power dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Data centers have caused skyrocketing power demand in parts of London. Now, new housing construction could be banned for more than a decade in some neighborhoods of the UK's biggest city because the electricity grid is reaching capacity, as first reported on by the Financial Times. The reason: too many data centers are taking up too much electricity and hogging available fiber optic cables. The Financial Times obtained multiple letters sent from the city's government, the Greater London Authority (GLA), to developers. "Major new applicants to the distribution network... including housing developments, commercial premises and industrial activities will have to wait several years to receive new electricity connections," said one note, according to the news outlet.

The GLA also confirmed the grid issue to Gizmodo in an email, and sent along text from one of the letters, which noted that for some areas utilities are saying "electricity connections will not be available for their sites until 2027 to 2030." Though the Financial Times reported that at least one letter indicated making the necessary electric grid updates in London could take up until 2035. [...] "Data centres use large quantities of electricity, the equivalent of towns or small cities, to power servers and ensure resilience in service," one of the GLA letters seen by the Financial Times reportedly said. [...] Developers are "still getting their heads round this, but our basic understanding is that developments of 25 units or more will be affected. Our understanding is that you just can't build them," said David O'Leary, policy director at the Home Builders Federation, a trade body. Combined, those sections of London contain about 5,000 homes and make up about 11% of the city's housing supply, according the Financial Times. A spokesperson for the London Mayor told Gizmodo in a statement: "The Mayor is very concerned that electricity capacity constraints in three West London boroughs are creating a significant challenge for developers securing timely connections to the electricity network, which could affect the delivery of thousands of much-needed homes...The increased demand for electricity capacity in the area is believed to be largely due to a rapid influx of batteries and data centers."
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Too Many Servers Could Mean No New Homes In Parts of the UK More

Too Many Servers Could Mean No New Homes In Parts of the UK

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  • wat (Score:4, Insightful)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday August 01, 2022 @10:39PM (#62754670) Homepage Journal

    The increased demand for electricity capacity in the area is believed to be largely due to a rapid influx of batteries and data centers.

    Batteries can relieve grid load problems by letting people draw power from them when grid capacity is unavailable, or even more directly by being used for grid stabilization. In what way are they supposed to be responsible for an increase in demand? Data centers yes, batteries... buh?

    • Batteries can relieve grid load problems by letting people draw power from them when grid capacity is unavailable, or even more directly by being used for grid stabilization. In what way are they supposed to be responsible for an increase in demand? Data centers yes, batteries... buh?

      Batteries allow people to evade rolling blackouts. When demand exceeds supply, utilities decrease demand by implementing rolling blackouts: periods of several hours per day power is turned off to a group of homes. When that period is finished, power is restored and turned off for a different group of homes. In this way, the utility is never providing service to 100% of homes at once. By varying the duration and frequency of the rolling blackouts, the utility can adjust that service percentage to bring i

  • Ban datacenters instead. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Monday August 01, 2022 @10:58PM (#62754692)
    The better thing to do is to regulate/tax the power usage of datacenters.

    Datacenters will then have the incentive to actually be efficient. Lots of energy wasted doing things in shitty ways, like running things written in interpreted or VM languages because the programmers are too stupid and lazy.

    Or at least stop doing unnecessary shit with all that unnecessary data.

    • Re:Ban bitcoin as well!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      That won't happen. The government is very pro big business and won't tax it. In the general hierarchy of needs, datacentres come way above housing for plebs.

      • To afford their houses, the plebs need jobs. They won't have those jobs if the businesses move elsewhere.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The old "don't you dare tax us or we will leave" gambit.

          The reality is that if a shitty business environment was enough to make companies leave, brexit would have done it already.

        • Datacenters have very few employees running the place. In an odd way, it is almost like the robots are taking over. They are displacing people from prime real estate. Very very prime real estate. Really kind of hard to believe that it is not cheaper to move the datacenter to a cheaper area outside of London and sell the land it was sitting on.

    • Data centers are landlords. They sell space, cooling, physical security, and power.

      They do not have any say in what language or CPU's their customers use.

      What the city can do is charge data centers more for power. The data centers then pass that cost to their customers who are then incentivized to find ways to reduce power.

      That won't happen. The data centers would become uncompetitive and shut down which would mean someone in the city planning office would lose out on their kickbacks for allowing the gri

      • Are the data centres actually in London, or are they further up the Thames valley towards places like Reading? It seems to me that land costs in London would put them off building there, let alone open themselves up to the city's regulations.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      The better thing to do is to regulate/tax the power usage of datacenters.

      They already kind of are.

      Businesses, ergo datacentres are not given the energy price cap that ordinary consumers gets, so they have to pay full market rate for energy in the UK. This encourages them to use as little power as they can because the cost of energy has risen significantly in the UK over the last few years.

      An additional tax wont change anything, it'll just make running a datacentre more expensive, ergo forcing them to raise prices and making overseas datacentres in Germany, the Netherlands,

    • Lots of energy wasted doing things in shitty ways, like running things written in interpreted or VM languages because the programmers are too stupid and lazy.

      You're begging the question. First you should prove that data centres are actually wasting energy, then you need to quantify the energy, and then compare the savings to alternatives such as changing hardware.

      Power is a cost and datacentres already have incentives to minimise it, which is precisely why so many go out of their way to design custom hardware to improve efficiency. However, the switch to ARM would make far more sense efficiency wise than your hate for interpreted languages.

    • Good thinking, can we ban Python in London? :) (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @10:59AM (#62756046)

      Datacenters will then have the incentive to actually be efficient. Lots of energy wasted doing things in shitty ways, like running things written in interpreted or VM languages because the programmers are too stupid and lazy.

      Good thinking. Let's ban Python and node.js in London! While we're at it, on the browser end, can we stop using 4000 frameworks and a megabyte of HTML per page? (I'm half joking)

      I've long worried about the ecological practice of bad software engineering and devs' obsession with throwing as many frameworks into the mix as possible. It's already annoying that everything gets slower every year despite hardware getting faster....but even worse, that slowness is due to wasted electricity and generates a lot of heat. A certain amount of frameworks are beneficial, but any more just seems like waste. I've seen many simple CRUD REST apps take minutes to complete saves that could take 1/2 of a second if they just stopped misusing ORM. I am amazed at how slow modern web pages are and then I view source and I see why. A simple landing page has megabytes of nested span tags for no reason from what I can tell. The layout is simple and static, but the devs are so used to fancy frameworks a simple page that should be a few kilobytes is megabytes of nested containers.

      I thought the move to cloud would make companies more cost sensitive and stop writing new production apps in node.js and Python to reduce costs when a Java/scala/Go version would be twice as fast and efficient. However, I was mistaken. I've seen from personal experience, most managers would rather waste millions of dollars in extra checks to AWS/Azure than spend time thinking about already deployed apps. One of our biggest expenses is a simple app written in Flask that needs about 10x more nodes than its Java siblings and all it does is simple CRUD, nothing that NEEDS python (it was written by a team we acquired in a merger)

      I spent years advocating removing misused ORM and replacing it with native SQL in a customer-facing application. 1/100th of the number of lines of codes and moving an operation users complain about from 5 min wait time to 1/2 second wait time (really bad misuse of ORM). I wrote the code and demo-ed the 600x performance improvement...seems like a slam dunk, right?....nope....the managers would rather write huge checks every month than risk a refactor (and this was extremely low risk).

      I'll wager half of the electricity consumed in a modern datacenter is waste....especially from lazy devs who, rather than learning a backend language that's fit for the task, would rather use their favorite scripting or browser language....the equivalent of me writing a UI in Java applets because I don't want to learn JavaScript.

      • the managers would rather write huge checks every month than risk a refactor

        Been there. The problem is that too many companies have a zero-tolerance approach to failure. If you proposed a thing and it wasn't 110% successful then you don't just lose your bonus, you're out. O-W-T, out. So you don't propose anything remotely risky until the gun is at your head because at best you'll get a pat on the head for being right, but more likely you'll get your books for being slightly wrong.

        I blame shareholders. Short term profits and "line goes up" leads to short term thinking. Biden's chipm

    • "The better thing to do is to regulate/tax the power usage of datacenters. "

      The Tories are all on deregulation and detaxing.

  • Modern fission power (Score:3)

    by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Monday August 01, 2022 @11:02PM (#62754696)

    Doesn't risk environmental catastrophes, doesn't have high weaponization potential even in countries less stable than UK. Just build it out and have both datacenters and homes without carbon emissions or bowing to Russia.

    • Re: Modern fission power (Score:5, Informative)

      by St.Creed ( 853824 ) on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @02:24AM (#62754918)

      The problem here isn't a general lack of energy, it's a lack of transformers and HV power lines. It's a distribution issue.

      We have the same issue in NL. Too much power being generated in the NE parts, too much being required in the NW parts near Amsterdam. And not enough capacity on the grid to bring it from A to B.

      I think the local utilities ordered about 100 main high voltage transformation installations but they are all built to order. Takes a long time.

      If someone has a mass produced and cheap alternative, they'll make a lot of money.

      • The problem here isn't a general lack of energy, it's a lack of transformers and HV power lines. It's a distribution issue.

        So it sounds like, rather than banning homes... or data centers... they should be concentrating on upgrading their grid to handle the increased usage, yes? No small feat, and not cheap by any means, but if you really want to anger voters, try telling them "sorry, you can't buy a home in this neighborhood because the server farm gets priority".

        • You're making an assumption that they aren't. They are. That's precisely why a timeline is mentioned. This shit takes time, a LOT of time. You don't just magic a few hundred MW in another direction on a whim.

          The UK didn't tell them no new homes because server farm gets priority. The server farm is already there. The grid is already full. You want to really screw your voters, then shutdown industry (right as a recession is already looming) just so you can build houses for the resulting poor. While this kind

      • "The problem here isn't a general lack of energy, it's a lack of transformers and HV power lines. It's a distribution issue."

        I guess Electricité de France, the second biggest provider in the UK just got nationalized by Macron and they'll invest in the EU instead of the contract-breaking Brits.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The UK government is trying to build new nuclear plants, but it's not going very well. The current one being built, Hinkley C, is costing several times the original budget and won't be ready for at least another decade. There is another new one that just been approved, Sizewell C, but the builder (EDF) is saying it will take at least 20 years to come online.

      A couple of weeks ago the UK auctioned off-shore wind licences. The energy produced costs about a quarter of natural gas, and an even smaller fraction o

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The real culprit is austerity (Score:4, Informative)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday August 01, 2022 @11:10PM (#62754702)
    Normally you would just build out more capacity for your power grid. We certainly have the technology to do so. But it's not very profitable especially in the short term.

    In the past when private companies could not be incentivized by profits to do something that was necessary for the public good the government would step in. But after four and a half almost five decades of non-stop austerity politics and a constant demand for tax cuts and only ever seem to go to the people at the top there just isn't any money to do that.

    • Re:The real culprit is austerity (Score:4, Informative)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @12:37AM (#62754796) Homepage

      Normally you would just build out more capacity for your power grid. We certainly have the technology to do so.

      Um, that's what they're doing.

      The clues are in the lines where they say things like "will have to wait several years to receive new electricity connections," and “electricity connections will not be available for their sites until 2027 to 2030.”

      • Re:The real culprit is austerity (Score:5, Informative)

        by LeeLynx ( 6219816 ) on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @01:09AM (#62754832)
        I think (hope?) the point is that should have already been happening. When your deficit reduction plan still includes tax cuts, you tend to start ignoring increasingly important things.

        • you tend to start ignoring increasingly important things

          Yes, but what they are ignoring is the rest of the UK. Westminster has focused all its efforts of economic growth on London and the South East and directly created this problem. There is plenty of grid capacity elsewhere and growth would be more evenly spread out if they would invest in the transport infrastructure.

          Instead, HS2 has been pruned down until it is almost useless, the transpennine upgrade was cancelled and yet London still got its Crossrail and now Crossrail2. This sort of myopic view of the

    • Were austerity in effect, nobody would be building out datacentres. Clearly there's a growth motive.

      • Austerity only applies to people that work for a living. Corporations and the wealthy and Britain's literal ruling class are exempt.
  • What bunch of over paid incompetents are managing the grid? And what needs to be done to replace the leadership in whole, until things run right! Is it the government?

    • What bunch of over paid incompetents are managing the grid? And what needs to be done to replace the leadership in whole, until things run right! Is it the government?

      They are called the 'Tory Party' and they are very fond of drawing the magic cost cutting-sword from the stone and swinging it about.

    • Sounds like Texas.

    • Re:Real question is? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by andrewbaldwin ( 442273 ) on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @06:08AM (#62755194)

      Is it the government?

      NO

      It's been privatised because that makes it so much more efficient (not).

      Instead of investing in growth for the benefit of all, profits (from a monopoly supply of an essential service) have been skimmed off to investors (who were / are mainly Tory party donors & chums), directors etc.

      The same outcome as the privatisation of the generation capacity [now mostly in foreign hands] and the middlemen selling electricity to the end users with virtually no competition as the 'big six' energy suppliers control everything [but we can't say 'cartel'].

      Still, all this must be an illusion, as Slashdot contributors keep telling me that public ownership is bad; private enterprise is good.

      • Well it was privatised in part due to being a mismanaged public utility. With politics there's a strange phenomenon where you are completely forbidden from breaking any eggs to make an omelette but for some reason you can throw all the eggs out and buy in pizza instead.

  • Batteries I can understand, as they buy power at cheap times, and use it during the expensive parts of the day, depriving the power company of all that juicy extra profit.

    But Data Centres? Unless they are getting free power I would have thought they'd be paying a handsome sum for all the power they use.

    Or is this just another case of the power company creating a problem so the government gives them cash to "fix it".

    • But Data Centres? Unless they are getting free power I would have thought they'd be paying a handsome sum for all the power they use.

      What does that have to do with available capacity?

      • But Data Centres? Unless they are getting free power I would have thought they'd be paying a handsome sum for all the power they use.

        What does that have to do with available capacity?

        The fact that this handsome sum they are paying does not seem to have been invested in building extra capacity?

        • The fact that this handsome sum they are paying does not seem to have been invested in building extra capacity?

          Why would it be, that would only lower the prices!

          • The fact that this handsome sum they are paying does not seem to have been invested in building extra capacity?

            Why would it be, that would only lower the prices!

            Well the UK public voted for a Tory Government, they are now getting what they wanted.

        • The fact that this handsome sum they are paying does not seem to have been invested in building extra capacity?

          I'd rather they use it to subsidize poor people's electricity than build new houses for rich people in the center of London.

          (this "housing shortage" is in a very specific place, it's not the whole of the UK as the headline might suggest)

  • Dupe? (Score:2)

    by suss ( 158993 )

    Isn't this basically a Dupe [slashdot.org] of this earlier article?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by cstacy ( 534252 )

      Isn't this basically a Dupe [slashdot.org] of this earlier article?

      Think of it as a hot fail-over server?

      #FAILoverANDover

  • new BBC serial (Score:4, Funny)

    by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Monday August 01, 2022 @11:42PM (#62754724)

    "Are You Being Servered?"

  • Electricity too expensive to heat buildings, not enough electricity for the data centres to turn into massive amounts of heat and dump it into the atmosphere, it is all so depressingly unsolvable.

  • It seems there's a whole new great replacement on the horizon.

  • Could have seen this coming (Score:3)

    by hoofie ( 201045 ) <(mickey) (at) (mouse.com)> on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @02:35AM (#62754934)

    I wouldn't think there are that many data centers in Hounslow. It's next to Heathrow yet but most of that Infrastructure is Richmond a different borough. Hounslow also isn't particularly densely housed by UK city standards, it's a suburb.

    It's very, very difficult to upgrade capacity in these areas as nearly all cables are buried and run under streets plus there isn't much room to put in a new substation feeder.

    Also if you take a patch of land that had say 6 houses on it and put in 40 apartments you have just multiplied by 6 times the electricity draw. And a lot of these housing developments are on brownfield or old sites so it's an additional draw not a replacement.

    It's common in other parts of the world for developers to get nailed for the cost of new electricity infrastructure beyond just running some feeds down the road.

    The core problem is the UK, especially London and it's surrounds, has seen a population explosion over the last 10-20 years that the politicians said wouldn't happen and stuck their head in the sands when it was blindingly clear it was happening and didn't spend a $ on expanding housing, health systems, education etc etc to cope with it.

    And that bastard Blair was in charge then not the Tories.

    • There's at least one: the Equinix DC opposite the north entrance to Heathrow. Note that Heathrow itself is a massive energy user.

      There are also datacentres at Stockley Park, not far away.

      It's not a new problem. We were told 10-15 years ago that power capacity in the area was very limited and that more power connections to datacentres nearby were going to be very difficult to get.

      In particular that Equinix DC got an additional 1MW connection about a decade ago after several years' wait and was told that was

  • Poor planning (Score:3)

    by bsdetector101 ( 6345122 ) on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @04:14AM (#62755056)
    Poor planning of data centers by the gov't and power company.

  • If homes for people are being delayed, because a data centre is storing completely unessential data, then that needs regulation!

    "Yeah, sorry home developers, you can't build here right now because Acme Data Ltd. needs all that power for an NFT blockchain solution."

    I am joking - to a degree - on that premise.
    But there's so TOTALLY some mileage here - what if that data centre is involved with cryptocurrency mining?

    But the way data storage is going, where we start to push more and more computation processes at

  • Combined, those sections of London contain about 5,000 homes and make up about 11% of the city's housing supply.

    So all 9 million Londoners live in a housing supply of 46,000 homes? How do they fit all 200 people in each home?

  • 1) connect to the server
    2) mkdir /home
    3) ....
    4) Profit!

  • The UK has twice as many homes in the UK than their are households. There is no requirement to build new homes there is twice the housing stock required.

  • Move the datacentres to Iceland, where's there's plenty of space and electricity is cheap.

  • I just wonder what CPUs all of these servers run on and why isn't anyone mandating efficiency improvements in them just like they do with cars.

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