Data Centre Watch

Latest

15 entries matching · showing 1–15

1. 23 Oct 2026 UK Wealdstone, Harrow, London Reported

   Burst main floods Wealdstone High Street during hosepipe ban

   Affinity Water confirmed a supply outage and sent engineers after a burst main flooded Wealdstone High Street in Harrow, closing the road through the morning of 23 October with diversions in place, the fire brigade and police working alongside the company. A small incident in a long season: the same network is under a hosepipe ban in drought, and leaks in the region are already under scrutiny after the BBC found residents waiting months for repairs.

   Why it matters: The ban asks households to save water while the pipes lose it — and the company’s own patch keeps supplying the evidence.

   Source: Harrow Online [V]

2. 23 Oct 2026 UK England Reported

   Reservoirs fall again despite the rain — 54% stored, 13 exceptionally low

   Two-thirds of England's reservoirs lost water in the week to 20 October even as the country took a second week of rain. National storage sits at 54%, about 22% below the long-term average, with 18 reservoirs under half full and 13 exceptionally low — among them Ardingly, Wimbleball, Colliford, Roadford, Stithians, Grafham and Rutland. England has had 52% of its October rainfall and the south-west just 43%; groundwater keeps falling, and the Environment Agency has recorded 411 drought incidents this year, more than in all of 2022. It warns farmers may not refill storage before the irrigation season opens on 1 November.

   Why it matters: The rain has stopped the argument, not the drought: storage kept falling in the week the storm arrived, and the refill season starts with the reservoirs still emptying.

   Source: Environment Agency — weekly drought report, 16–22 October 2026 (GOV.UK) [V]

3. 21 Oct 2026 UK Somerset, England Reported

   Lib Dems call for on-farm reservoirs as Somerset dries

   Sarah Dyke, the Liberal Democrat MP for Glastonbury and Somerton and the party's rural affairs spokesperson, has called for a national extreme-weather emergency strategy, an overhaul of the water industry and a 'call to store' programme funding on-farm reservoirs, after Somerset was moved into severe drought on 15 October. Wimbleball reservoir, which supplies around 300,000 customers across Somerset, Devon and Dorset, stood at 16% against roughly 75% normally expected at this time of year. An ONS survey of 10,620 adults found 40% said they had been affected by drought in the past year.

   Why it matters: The drought response is splitting in two: cut demand (bans, restrictions) or build storage (reservoirs, on-farm tanks). Both arguments are now being made in the same county, with the reservoir serving 300,000 people at a fifth of its normal level.

   Source: Somerset County Gazette [V]

4. 21 Oct 2026 UK Scotland Reported

   Could Scotland's AI data centres be a target list for hostile nations?

   Defence analyst Stuart Crawford tells The National that Scotland's data centres 'would absolutely' be on a 'target list of any hostile nation', especially with hybrid warfare 'all around us'. It follows the war's first data-centre strikes — Russia hitting or disrupting 14 named Ukrainian operators from mid-September, then Ukraine striking three Yandex sites — and MI5's warning that AI is 'supercharging' cyberattacks, with dwell times down from weeks to about 72 minutes. APRS warns Scotland has 'no control over what these data centres are going to be used for', with around 30 planned and concentrated in the central belt. Edinburgh's Professor Andrew Neal pushes back: no case for singling out Scotland, though data centres are increasingly military-relevant.

   Why it matters: A new axis in the planning row — not just water and power, but what the building is for, and who might target it.

   Source: The National [C]

5. 20 Oct 2026 UK London Reported

   A power event at Google Cloud's London zones takes down UK banks

   A power event at Google Cloud's London data-centre zones knocked services offline for hours on 20 October, taking down banking apps (Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC), Rightmove and court systems before recovering for most customers. The outage — and the Guardian's line that the cloud is 'too big to not fail' — put the UK's reliance on a handful of providers into the foreground.

   Why it matters: The concentration risk in one paragraph: a single London facility's power fault becomes a national outage.

   Source: BBC News / The Guardian [C]

6. 16 Oct 2026 UK Devon, England Reported

   Devon council leader blames South West Water's 'neglect' for the drought

   Devon County Council's leader, Julian Brazil, told the BBC the drought had been 'decades in the making' and that South West Water's 'neglect' had 'put us here'. It is a rare case of a county authority naming its water company as the cause rather than the weather, coming as the South West sits in severe drought, Wimbleball reservoir stands at a fifth of capacity and a non-essential use ban application waits with the Environment Secretary.

   Why it matters: Local government naming the cause changes the politics: restrictions are argued as the consequence of underinvestment, not of rainfall — the same case the campaign makes about who should pay for resilience.

   Source: BBC News [V]

7. 16 Oct 2026 UK Oxfordshire Reported

   Didcot data centres to be studied for a waste-heat network

   Vale of White Horse District Council has commissioned a heat-network techno-economic feasibility study for roughly 400,000 sq m (4.3m sq ft) of proposed data centres on brownfield land beside Didcot Power Station. Nordic Energy will assess viability, heat sources and demand, delivery models and alignment with the new heat-network zoning rules (tender closes 9 November), reporting in March 2027.

   Why it matters: A council testing whether the build-out's waste heat can be captured — and doing it as a cluster, not scheme by scheme.

   Source: DCD [C]

8. 16 Oct 2026 UK Cardiff, Wales 150 MW Reported

   Cardiff data centre seeks its own gas power station

   The developer of a 150MW data centre at Cardiff East Park and Ride, near Llanrumney, is also seeking permission for a 'temporary' 49.9MW gas plant — five turbines plus a steam generator and two standby — to run from July 2028 for up to five years while it waits for a grid connection that may not arrive until 2030–34, plus 40 diesel backup generators. Friends of the Earth Cymru calls it 'climate-wrecking'; nearly all the area's MSs, a Welsh government minister and a senior Labour councillor have objected, and the Welsh government has issued a holding direction while it considers calling the scheme in.

   Why it matters: The grid queue is so long that developers are building power stations next door — and calling them temporary.

   Source: BBC News [C]

9. 15 Oct 2026 UK National Reported

   Energy chiefs warn data centres could push up household bills

   The Times reports that energy chiefs have warned of a public backlash against data centres if a large rise in their number pushes up what households pay for power. It lands as the 'who pays for the grid?' question moves to the centre of the UK debate, echoing Moody's warning that Europe's data-centre demand could lift consumer prices unless governments intervene.

   Why it matters: Who pays for the power is becoming the fault line — not just whether it's green.

   Source: The Times [C]

10. 14 Oct 2026 UK National Reported

    Gas microgrids pitched as 'sustainable' power for data centres

    AVK-SEG — the firm behind Europe's first gas-microgrid data centre (Pure DC's 90MW Dublin site) — is piloting gas turbines plus carbon capture to power data centres in northern England and lobbying to gas-power the AI boom, DeSmog reports. It notes the UK undercounted data-centre emissions by more than 100×; revised figures predict 123 Mt CO₂ from data centres by 2035.

    Why it matters: Fossil gas is being rebranded 'sustainable' — with carbon capture experts call unproven.

    Source: DeSmog [C]

11. 14 Oct 2026 UK National Reported

    UK 'one of Europe's slowest-growing' data-centre markets

    Kearney puts UK demand growth at ~17.6% a year to 2030 — second-last in Europe behind Germany — against 37.6% (Finland) and 36.8% (Norway). Build cost is ~€2.25m/MW in the UK and Western Europe versus ~€600k in the Nordics; the fix is cheaper power, cheaper land and faster grid connections.

    Why it matters: The investment is mobile: as one consultancy put it, 'everything else will go where it is easier to build'.

    Source: Kearney via City AM [C]

12. 13 Oct 2026 UK National Reported

    The carbon bill for the UK's data-centre boom

    A fresh count puts the running UK estate at only ~1.5GW (about 1.5 Mt CO₂e a year), but the committed pipeline at 173 projects / 14.6GW — which would add roughly 12 Mt a year on today's grid, or 38 Mt if it all ran on gas. Weighted by region, about a third of the pipeline sits in the dirtiest areas (South England, Yorkshire, South Wales), and most planning documents say nothing about clean energy.

    Why it matters: The emissions are a by-product of siting for grid access, land and demand — not a technology accident.

    Source: Computer Weekly [C]

13. 11 Oct 2026 UK National Reported

    Regen: a 1GW gas data centre could emit up to 5.7 Mt CO₂ a year

    Regen estimates a 1GW gas-fired data centre could emit 2.7–5.7 million tonnes of CO₂ a year, and that of 152 UK applications only 13% mention on-site generation and 9% state a connection type. It calls for mandatory power disclosure in applications and a moratorium on gas-primary schemes.

    Why it matters: The disclosure gap, in numbers — most applications don't say how they'll be powered, in a country promising net zero.

    Source: Armason weekly [C]

14. 11 Oct 2026 UK National Reported

    The UK's data-centre pipeline: 173 projects, 14.6GW against ~1.6GW existing

    Analysis puts the UK pipeline at 173 committed projects totalling ~14.6GW of planned capacity, versus ~1.6GW of existing capacity — a tenfold gap. It also cites UK power costs at roughly four times US levels (an estimated £226m a year for a 100MW site) and ~1.9bn litres of English data-centre water use a year that operators aren't required to report.

    Why it matters: The scale of what's proposed, the price of power, and the water nobody has to disclose — in three numbers.

    Source: Servnet / Computer Weekly [C]

15. 8 Oct 2026 UK London / national Reported

    A UK firm pitches 'election-grade' data to defeat planning opposition

    Amphio Technologies, a US-funded UK company incorporated in August 2026, is offering developers mass public-opinion measurement 'modelled down to individual neighbourhoods' — election-style intelligence aimed at defeating data-centre and infrastructure opposition. Founder James Yucel (previously real-estate private equity, the Onward think tank and Focaldata) points to opposition groups doubling to 833 across 49 US states in early 2026 and a May 2026 Gallup poll in which 71% opposed a data centre near their home.

    Why it matters: The counter-offensive: developers are buying the same machinery that wins elections — worth knowing that some planning arguments are being engineered, not just made.

    Source: Green Street News / Amphio [C]