This Report explains that there is no register for demand connections in the grid queue and that the latest estimate from Ofgem of data centre connections of contracted demand in the grid queue is 73GW, which is 1.5 times winter peak GB energy demand. Demand connections also do not need to show strategic alignment, unlike transmission and storage connections. We conclude that the Scottish Government needs to use its Planning powers to put in place a moratorium and make their own strategic plan for data centres. 27 August 2026

Summary 

This report brings together information in the public domain, answers to FoIs and answers to follow up questions APRS sent to NESO by email after a meeting with two officials.

The key points are: 

• NESO holds no register of electricity demand projects including data centres so we don’t have a definitive measure of how much there is – we only know that there is 73GW of contracted data centre demand connections GB-wide, more than one and a half times as much as peak GB demand
• The grid queue is still open for new demand projects
• Demand projects don’t need to show evidence of strategic alignment (i.e. alignment with CP2030 and SSEP) to progress in the grid queue, unlike storage and generation projects.
• All data centres, including hyperscale AI data centres, have been designated critical national infrastructure, which is a UK-wide designation that suggests data centres will have priority access to power.
• This month the UK Government gave powers to NESO to respond to grid stress with three-hour rolling blackouts.
• Scottish Government Ministers are leaning heavily on the Strategic Spatial energy Plan (SSEP) that NESO is currently producing, with numerous PQ answers referencing it, however this will not help on data centres because it won’t report until Autumn 2027 and because demand connections (unlike generation and storage connections) don’t have to demonstrate ‘strategic need’ – ie they don’t need to be aligned with SSEP.

The only tool Scotland has to manage this situation of far too much contracted demand that NESO has allowed to gather in the grid queue, is the planning system. Ministers need to put in place their own strategic plan and analysis for data centres, and use the planning system to achieve it, as none of the levers on the grid queue sit with Scottish Ministers.

Report

Two weeks ago Ofgem, the energy markets regulator for Great Britain, made an extraordinary admission. In a consultation document they said that “between November

2024 and June 2025, contracted demand in the connection queue increased from 41

GW to 125 GW. Of this, around 73 GW are data centres”. They also note that over 93% of that figure are for data centres over 100MW.[1]  In the press release the figure was quoted as ‘at least 80GW’. This figure had grown significantly since Ofgem’s previous consultation in February 2026, which put demand from data centres at 50MW.

Contracted demand is the electricity demand that developers have received connection offers for, and signed agreements for, but which is not yet operational.    

To put this in context, the peak demand of Great Britain in 2025 was 45.8GW, which was hit on 9 January 2025, and 2025 saw an average demand over the year of 31.7 GW (weekdays) and 28.8GW (weekends). So the demand that has been already contracted to data centres is coming up for double peak demand and is nearly three times our average power demand.

The current policy around the grid queue and data centres

We looked at why this quoted figure for the power demand in the grid queue keeps changing, and why it is rising by looking at publicly available documents and through some questions we asked to NESO by email. We found that it is likely due to a combination of two factors: firstly because NESO are finding out more information about the demand grid queue they previously didn’t know, and secondly because, although the grid queue effectively closed to new generation and storage projects while NESO undertake their grid reform process, they did not close it to new demand connections.  

1. Neso do not know how much is in the demand queue

In an answer to a Freedom of Information Request asking for information about data centre projects in December 2025 NESO said they ‘do not currently have a register of demand connections’.

In the response they say that they ‘are considering this as a development piece, but it would take considerable time to produce. The data is held in various data sources including contracts, and would need to be extracted from these sources, reviewed and consolidated. To determine whether any demand projects are data centres would involve manually checking these various data sources.’ 

NESO are required to keep an up to date and publicly available database for connections that will generate or store energy. This is called the TEC register (standing for Transmission Entry Capacity) and is updated twice weekly. However there is no equivalent for demand connections. NESO told us in email answers in August 2026 to some questions I sent them that “The regulator, Ofgem, is also exploring options to potentially create a Demand Capacity Register which may provide more clarity in the future.”

There is a voluntary list called the ‘Existing Agreements Register’ which the same FoI says “details all projects that applied for “Gate 2” in the Connections Reform process where consent was given for inclusion”. We believe that this includes some demand connections, but is a small sample of the connections due to the need for developers to give consent to be included.[2]

In November 2025 NESO issued a demand Queue Call for Input (CfI) to seek information in a bid to get a handle on the status of the projects in the demand queue saying “There has been a recent surge in demand connection applications which exceeds even the most ambitious forecasts for future demand.” 

In February 2026 Ofgem reported that NESO’s Demand Queue Call for Input (CFI) ‘identified around 140 (50 GW) data centres, the majority of which are likely to receive a Gate 2 offer. 71 (around 20GW) data centres reported they have achieved financial commitment with Final Investment Decision (FID), indicating a significant volume of mature data centre projects in the demand queue’. Given that this call for input was voluntary, it is likely that this would have been an underestimate, hence the increase to 73GW in the latest consultation, and 80GW by the time they issued the press release.

However the demand queue is also still continuing to grow.

2. The demand queue is still open.

Shortly after the deadline for the call for information about the demand queue, NESO issued its announcement about reform of the grid queue due to huge oversupply of, particularly,  battery and onshore wind in the grid queue. This resulted in a pause on new projects with a move to opening application windows when space allows.

However this was not the case for demand connections. In May 2026 NESO put in place Minimum Information Requirements for demand connections above 5MVA, but did not close the queue. 

Instead of closing the queue, Ofgem have proposed a process for weeding out those projects least likely to progress including through a process they called ‘curate, plan and connect’ consulted on in February 2026. Their most recent consultation, published 29 July, was the one where they said there was 73GW of contracted data centre demand in the grid queue, and this one proposes charging developers to stay in the grid queue.

3. Demand connections don’t need to show ‘Strategic need’ unlike generation and storage projects.

In addition to the above, demand connections need to meet readiness requirements but not a ‘strategic need’ requirement, unlike transmission (generation and storage) projects.

This is a quote from answers to questions we asked to NESO. 

“At present, large electricity demand projects, including data centres, must meet the readiness criteria to secure a place in the connections pipeline, but they are not assessed against a strategic need test, like generation projects are.”

The strategic need test has come in as part of the connections reform and replaces the previous system of first come first served. NESO’s advice on the new connections process for transmission projects says ‘To progress through the queue, developers must demonstrate both readiness and alignment with one or more strategic criteria’

It means that projects have to be aligned with the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, SSEP (when it is published) and other strategic documents.

However data centre projects do not need this alignment and instead progress forward in the grid queue depending only on readiness criteria, which include showing the project has secured land rights and showing progression through the planning system.

4. Data Centres as critical National Infrastructure

What makes this even more serious is that, in September 2024, the UK Government designated data centres as part of the country’s critical national infrastructure. This designation covers all four nations of the UK and the Government did not specify what type or functions of data centres are included in this designation. Therefore it applies to all data centres and will include hyperscale AI data centres training and doing inference of AI large language models. These activities could certainly not be considered critical in the same way as other data centre services, and they also take vast amounts more energy (using GPUs rather than CPUs). 

We believe that being part of the country’s critical national infrastructure could mean that their power supplies are likely to be protected as part of the suite of protections they receive. 

The UK Government website says “Given the fundamental and connected nature of these services, failure has the potential to cause cascading and catastrophic consequences. This could be, for example, power outages impacting other essential functions, like transport or water provision, or a failure in the telecoms or data infrastructure sectors impacting the energy sector – across all four nations”  (my emphasis)  

Given the situation this summer with the grid nearly tipping over due to electricity demands of air conditioning in the heatwave, this seems particularly serious, especially with the vast amount of energy demand that is likely to be connected due to the hyperscale AI data centres in the grid queue.

In addition to this, in the second week of August, the UK Government gave powers to NESO to respond with three-hour rolling blackouts in the case of strain on the grid in future.

5. Data Centres as Priority in grid queue

In March Ofgem published a consultation which proposed giving data centres priority connections, which received an immediate response from the housebuilders who were concerned about the impacts that giving data centres priority would have on the ability of the UK to meet its housing targets. A report from the London Assembly looked at the impacts of data centre energy demand on housebuilding, and reported that three London Boroughs have housing moratoriums due to lack of available power due to data centres.

In contrast, this week Bloomberg reported that Denmark had put data centres as the lowest priority in its new four-part grid queue, after existing users, homes, small business and hospitals, the opposite situation of the UK where data centres are being granted priority.

What tools do Scotland have at their disposal to manage this situation?

The Strategic Spatial Energy Plan (SSEP), being prepared by NESO, has been doing a lot of heavy lifting in responses from Ministers to numerous Parliamentary questions about projections of future data centre demand, and data centre impacts on the grid, electricity bills and climate. These include: 

• Ben Macphereson answering S7W-01336 about a coordinated oversight framework for large data centres, 
• Richard Lochhead answering S6W-42877 about assessments made of cumulative impact of data centres on the grid, water resources, ground water and local communities, and S6W-42876 on actions to match grid connections with preferred sites on the Scottish Enterprise short-list; 
• Gillian Martin answering S6W-43431 on total future energy demand for data centres; 
• Ivan McKee answering S6W-41364 on the impact of AI data centre demand on the energy grid. 
• And Gillian Martin answering a follow up to an oral question asked by Foysol Choudbury on climate targets and energy bills – 25 June 2026, 

However the SSEP cannot help to manage this situation of over capacity of contracted power demand in the grid queue. This is because, firstly, the SSEP has been delayed until Autumn 2027, which is evidently far too late for the situation we are facing with the majority of the planning applications expected to come in within months. And secondly the Strategic Spatial energy plan is optimising 1-2GW of data centre demand GB-wide[3], but there is 73GW in the contracted demand queue. This does not add up. Since, as we saw above, data centre demand does not need to meet a strategic need test, i.e. it does not need to align with SSEP and Clean Power 2030. 

This means that, even if SSEP was delivered within a useful timeframe for the 20+ hyperscale data centres we currently have proposed in Scotland, it would be of no use in guiding whether a particular data centres gets a grid connection or not. 

The Power of Planning Permission.

The one powerful tool in the belt of the Scottish Government for dealing with this situation is the planning system.

Planning permission is the only way that Scotland can retain sovereignty over these decisions in the face of, what seems like, total chaos in the grid queue. It is vital that the Scottish Government put an immediate moratorium on the planning permissions for hyperscale data centres while they consider this situation and how best to manage it.

Kat Jones, APRS August 2026

Notes

[1] An extract from the 29 July Ofgem consultation document.

Of the 73GW in the queue, most of the MW capacity is extra-large and hyperscale projects

When considering the feasibility of this pipeline of data centre development materialising and the volume of possible speculative, non-viable projects:

• Peak GB electricity demand in 2025/2610 was 45 GW.
• This overall pipeline of data centre development represents £693 billion of implied total capex, around 23% of UK GDP in 2025, assuming an average capex of £9.5m per MW (see Chapter 5 for details on how this is derived).
• Bloomberg analysis and reporting in February 2026 suggest around $650 billion of global capex into AI infrastructure by the four largest tech companies: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta, Microsoft

As well as new data centre projects joining the queue, our analysis shows that between May 2024 and August 2025 at least 9 GW of data centres in the transmission queue had modified their connection request from a ‘battery’ technology to data centre. A number of stakeholders have pointed to a financial incentive structure that make battery, and other technologies, increasingly likely to modify their current connection to become data centres at the next application window, also as a result of connections reform changes.

[2]  In an answer to a January 2026 FoI, NESO says ‘The Existing Agreement (EA) Register details all projects that applied for “Gate 2” in the Connections Reform process where the developer consented to the inclusion of a project in the EA Register. If a project does not appear on the EA Register consent may not have been given for inclusion, or the project may not have applied for “Gate 2”.

[3] In answer to a question I emailed to NESO they said:

“The 1–2GW figure referenced as being optimised by the SSEP is GB-wide rather than Scotland-only. It reflects the volume of flexible data centre demand that is being spatially optimised within the SSEP, rather than a forecast or cap on future Scottish data centre demand. The volume of data centre demand considered in network planning will continue to evolve as projects progress through the connections process and as further evidence becomes available. Any updates would be reflected through future network planning publications.”