IN Brief:
- UK gas networks received 113 enquiries from data centre developers across 2024 and 2025.
- Future Energy Networks said enquiries in 2025 were around three times higher than in 2024.
- The figures show how electricity grid connection delays are affecting large demand infrastructure.
Future Energy Networks figures show that UK gas networks received 113 connection enquiries from data centre developers across 2024 and 2025, with electricity grid connection delays pushing some projects to examine alternative energy routes.
The representative body for the UK gas networks said enquiries rose sharply in 2025, reaching around three times the level recorded in 2024. Gas networks are processing 46 applications from data centre developers, while seven applications have secured connection agreements representing 15.4TWh of capacity.
The figures highlight a growing infrastructure planning problem around high-capacity digital sites. Data centres require large, reliable energy supplies, and demand is rising as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and digital services expand. Electricity access has become one of the decisive factors in where projects are built and how quickly they can become operational.
Developers facing long electricity connection timelines are exploring gas connections and on-site generation as a way to secure power. That route can support short-term project delivery, but it also raises difficult questions around emissions, system planning, and long-term alignment with clean power targets.
The UK government has already begun examining strategic demand within the electricity connections process. Its consultation on accelerating connections for strategic demand includes projects such as data centres, with attention on queue management, speculative applications, and the allocation of scarce network capacity.
Data centres create a distinctive challenge for electricity networks. Their loads are large, concentrated, and often linked to tight development timetables. A single site can require capacity at a scale more commonly associated with major industrial users. That demand must be assessed against local reinforcement needs, wider transmission constraints, competing connection requests, and the cost of delivering firm capacity.
The rise in gas enquiries also exposes the limits of treating energy networks in isolation. Electricity and gas systems are planned and regulated through different frameworks, but developers make investment decisions across the available energy options. Where electricity access is slow or uncertain, gas infrastructure can become a fallback route to energisation.
That dynamic can create tension between project delivery and decarbonisation. Data centres are part of the UK’s digital infrastructure base, but their growth adds substantial pressure to an electricity system already managing renewable connections, storage projects, industrial electrification, heat electrification, and electric vehicle charging.
Powered land is now a strategic asset. Site selection is increasingly shaped by available capacity, grid queue position, reinforcement cost, and delivery certainty. Developers that can secure timely access to energy hold a stronger commercial position than those dependent on long reinforcement programmes.
The connection reform process will need to distinguish viable strategic demand from speculative capacity requests without weakening the investment signal for network expansion. Large demand loads will continue to grow, and the electricity system will need clearer mechanisms for assessing which projects receive capacity, when they receive it, and how the associated reinforcement is funded.
The increase in gas network enquiries shows what happens when electricity infrastructure becomes a development bottleneck. Data centre power demand is arriving faster than many connection processes were designed to handle, and the energy system is now shaping the geography of digital infrastructure as much as the availability of land, fibre, and planning consent.
