The AI Race Is Pressuring Utilities to Squeeze More From Europe’s Power Grids

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 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 that AI labs are spending on compute. “Across Europe, projects are being canceled 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.”

The queue of data centers waiting to join the UK grid began to swell rapidly toward the end of 2024, around the time the government designated them “critical national infrastructure.” Since then, connection applications have “far exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts,” according to UK energy regulator Ofgem, and the queue has tripled in size. “We knew we had this new wave of demand coming from electrification of transport and heat,” says Smith. “Now we’ve got AI on top.”

One obvious solution is to build new power lines, but that’s both expensive and slow. Depending on the scale of a development, it can take anywhere from seven to 14 years to build new transmission infrastructure, accounting for potential planning issues, legal objections, supply chain and labor bottlenecks, and construction. “It takes time to put the stuff in the ground, connect it up, get the linesmen up there to do all that work,” says Jack Presley Abbott, deputy director for strategic planning and connections at Ofgem.

The particular geography of the UK poses further problems. A large proportion of the UK’s renewable energy is generated in Scotland and North England, whereas energy consumption—including by data centers—is concentrated at the opposite, more populous end of the country. Meanwhile, difficult terrain on the UK’s western flank means transmission lines have to be corridored down the east of the country’s landmass or offshore, limiting the options for network expansion.

Against that backdrop, National Grid is experimenting with technologies that can be applied after-the-fact to squeeze more capacity out of the grid and potentially allow more data centers to connect. “Large customers willing to pay to use your network are fantastic. The trick is, can you find ways of connecting them where you don’t have to build huge amounts of new infrastructure?” says Smith.