Tag: batteries

The next big challenge for data centres isn’t more power

15 October 2026

Opinion
Battery energy storage site and wind turbines

This story first appeared in Data Center POST

  • Data centers are so vital to modern life that the UK has granted them critical national infrastructure status, elevating data and energy security to matters of national security.
  • While AI-driven energy demand is rising rapidly, the real hurdle is managing highly unpredictable, variable daily load patterns rather than just generating more total power.
  • Resilience requires a flexible electricity system capable of balancing supply and demand in real time using solutions like energy storage, dispatchable generation, smart energy management, and workload shifting.
  • Energy flexibility has become a business differentiator with companies like Google and Meta diversifying their power sources, while grid trials and rapid battery storage growth show real momentum.

Data Centers are so essential to modern life that, in 2024, the UK granted them the same critical national infrastructure status as water, energy and emergency services.

Protecting data infrastructure relies in part on protecting power and maintaining energy security. This has exposed a new reality: as data and energy become strategic dependencies, both are matters of national security.

As further proof of this, data centers and critical energy sites are known to be targeted in times of international conflict; such actions can exacerbate ongoing supply disruption and price volatility.

Against this backdrop, it’s clear that systems built on concentrated energy sources, such as an overreliance on one fuel type, can leave countries and operators exposed.

At the same time, it’s impossible to ignore the speed at which AI-driven energy demand is climbing. Data Centers are already consuming 6% of electricity in the UK and US, and that growth is not anticipated to slow.

However, because AI workloads are unevenly distributed and highly variable, data centers can have unpredictable fluctuations in power needs, surging during processing, dipping when they pause to share data or sync, and then repeating that cycle when they start the next batch. While daily averages might look consistent, demand throughout the day can fluctuate by hundreds of megawatts every few minutes.

In an environment of rising demand, unpredictable and dynamic load patterns, and geopolitical risk, simply adding more generation will not be enough. The real challenge is flexibility.

Flexibility will define the next era of energy

There is no single technology that can deliver the secure supply that AI will require. Resilience comes from combining dispatchable generation, renewable energy sources, storage, and smart energy management into a system flexible enough to respond to growing demand while guarding against volatility and disruption.

A data center’s ability to consistently access energy depends on the electricity system’s ability to adapt to changing conditions in real time, balancing supply and demand while maintaining a steady flow of power. Generation provides the power. Flexibility determines how effectively that power can be delivered and used, acting as a shock absorber against swings in supply and demand.

Historically, electricity systems have been designed around relatively predictable demand patterns.

Today, AI is introducing a new kind of demand. This dynamic is the reason flexibility will become one of the defining aims for the energy industry in years to come.

Flexibility as a business differentiator

Technology companies like Google and Meta are already diversifying to ensure energy security for their facilities. Google, for example, is purchasing nuclear power from Kairos Power’s small modular reactors to serve its AI facilities, while Meta has introduced a space-solar partnership with Overview Energy.

These investments demonstrate how energy resilience and flexibility are emerging as commercial differentiators for operators. Reliable access to power can be the difference between a data center’s success or failure. It allows organizations to manage risk, control costs, and scale more confidently. Flexibility can come from both the supply side (storage, dispatchable generation, and intermittent renewable generation) and the demand side (smart energy management, shifting workloads).

  • Energy Storage: Captures electricity when supply is abundant to be used later on when demand is high. Solutions include battery energy storage systems and pumped storage hydro.
  • Dispatchable Generation: Can ramp up quickly to generate electricity when needed. Examples include biomass and natural gas power plants.
  • Smart Energy Management: Using advanced software and AI, virtual power plants and other solutions can optimise cooling systems, server utilisation, and power consumption in real-time based on grid conditions.
  • Shifting Workloads: Moves non-urgent workloads to off-peak periods or physical locations to reduce stress on energy systems when demand is higher.

Together, these approaches can bolster energy systems and enable them to better respond to AI’s increasingly dynamic demand, while insulating against volatility and price swings.

Where We Stand Today

The good news is that there are signs of meaningful progress. In the UK, battery storage capacity surpassed nuclear generation for the first time, leaping from just under 10 MW to almost 7 GW in less than a decade. Elsewhere, earlier this year Emerald AI and the National Grid joined with other partners to complete a trial which proved that, through smart software, AI facilities can adjust electricity consumption in response to real-time demand signals without impacting critical operations.

Data centers need more of these solutions quickly because the cost of getting system flexibility wrong can be high, including rising costs, renewable curtailment, and reduced energy security. Meanwhile, as the geopolitical shocks that rocked energy markets have shown, reverting to and relying on the cheapest or fastest deployed single source also carries great risk.

AI’s energy demand is often framed as a race for more megawatts, but that’s an oversimplification. AI’s growth will depend just as much on the electricity system’s ability to adapt and continue delivering as it will on the megawatts.

To build a secure energy system capable of supporting the next generation of AI infrastructure, the UK must invest in flexible technologies that can meet the dynamic needs of future energy demand.

Why flexibility has become the UK’s shock absorber

7 August 2026

Opinion

This article has been republished with permission from Enlit World.

Will Gardiner, Drax CEO

Britain’s electricity system has never stood still. Over the past century it has continually reinvented itself to meet the needs of the country it serves.

The first major tasks of energy transformation in the twentieth century included mass electrification and cleaning up power generation – driven by the formation of the National Grid in 1926, the phase out of coal, and the growth of renewable energy.

Today, three major pressures have converged including the continued growth of renewable energy, which is bringing greater intermittency into the electricity system, electricity demand is rising sharply as more sectors electrify and the grid is coming under greater strain as new technologies and infrastructure connect to the network.

These are creating a new defining test: building system flexibility that can respond to more variable supply, volatile demand, and a strained grid. Flexibility is not a nice-to-have. It is the system’s shock absorber.

Essential flexibility

Flexibility operates on both the supply and demand sides of the energy equation, in the form of storage, generation (dispatchable and renewable), smart energy management, and shifting workloads.

Achieving this depends on a range of technologies – including transmission infrastructure, flexible generation assets, long-duration energy storage and battery energy storage systems (BESS), and asset optimisation platforms that help manage electricity demand and supply in real time – each playing an important role in supporting a more resilient grid.

No single technology provides the answer. Together, they help balance intermittent renewable generation, maintain system reliability, improve resilience during periods of high demand and reduce overall system costs.

As energy requirements continue to evolve, flexibility has become just as important as generation itself in ensuring the UK can deliver a secure, reliable and lower-carbon electricity system.

Beyond energy

Getting flexibility right delivers benefits that extend well beyond the energy sector.

Recent geopolitical events – from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to renewed tensions in the Middle East – have highlighted how quickly international energy markets can become volatile. Energy security and national security are becoming increasingly difficult to separate.

Greater domestic generation and increased system flexibility can help reduce that exposure, improve overall system efficiency, support more stable long-term energy costs, encourage investment and job creation, and strengthen the UK’s industrial competitiveness.

Most importantly, it creates the platform for broader economic modernisation. A flexible and resilient electricity system will help enable the technologies, industries and businesses that will drive the UK’s next chapter of growth.

Powering innovation

Any discussion about the future of the UK’s electricity system quickly turns to artificial intelligence. The UK Government forecasts that the country will need at least 6GW of AI-capable data centre capacity by 2030, which is roughly three times more than today’s capacity.

Data centres’ energy needs constantly fluctuate – sometimes by hundreds of megawatts per minute. As workloads surge, pause and restart, the challenge cannot be met by more power alone, but also needs to account for how that power is managed dynamically.

AI will undoubtedly play an important role in shaping future electricity demand patterns, but it is only one part of a much broader picture.

Reliable electricity underpins almost every area of modern innovation. We often think about breakthroughs in healthcare, advanced manufacturing or artificial intelligence as separate stories. The reality is they are not.

They all have one thing in common: they depend on a resilient, flexible electricity system. From more effective cancer treatments and AI-enabled medical imaging to increasingly automated factories and the data centres powering the digital economy, electricity is what makes those innovations possible.

I’ve always considered energy the silent partner behind economic growth. It may not always be the focus of public attention, but it is fundamental to enabling innovation across every sector. However, flexibility is what will decide whether that partner can keep up.

Without a system that can respond to changing patterns of demand, many of those ambitions simply cannot happen at the same speed, or they come at greater cost.

This changing reality has shaped our own thinking. We’ve been evolving from a predominantly single-technology business into a provider of system flexibility.

Defining test

Today, we’re investing across open cycle gas turbines (OCGTs), BESS and renewable generation. Our recommended offer for Bluefield Solar Income Fund has the potential to add approximately 900MW of solar and wind generation. Combined with our other flexible generation assets, our portfolio could exceed 3GW of power capacity if our offer is accepted.

For me, that’s not simply about growing our portfolio. It’s about ensuring we’re investing in the dynamic capabilities the UK will need to power progress. This is where Drax can play a different role not just producing power but helping the system respond when it matters most.

The UK’s electricity system has continually adapted to meet new challenges over the past century, and effectively managing rising demand, intermittency, and more complex patterns of supply and demand will be no different.

That is why the next phase of our energy transition relies not simply on generating more renewable power, but ensuring we have the flexible infrastructure required to use it effectively.