This aerial photograph shows Statkraft’s new Greener Grid Park in Liverpool, north-west England on August 7, 2025.
DARREN STAPLES/AFP via Getty Images
Britain’s electricity grid is so overwhelmed by AI infrastructure applications that two planned datacenter campuses, unable to secure clean grid connections, are building their own gas-fired power stations instead — and when they open, the two sites together will annually emit more carbon dioxide than ExxonMobil’s entire UK operations, according to new analysis by digital rights nonprofit Foxglove published Tuesday.
The calculation is as stark as the engineering problem behind it: the UK’s grid connection queue now holds applications totaling 125 gigawatts (GW) of requested capacity — nearly three times Britain’s peak national electricity demand of roughly 45GW — and datacenter projects alone account for at least 73GW of that backlog, according to Ofgem’s datacenter connection reforms consultation. Because waiting years for a clean grid connection defeats the commercial case for building AI infrastructure, the developers of Wapseys Wood in Buckinghamshire and Quest Park in Bedfordshire have each reached the same conclusion: skip the grid, generate power on-site with gas turbines, and start operating now.
The carbon consequence of that workaround, applied at 1.3GW of combined capacity, is what Foxglove’s analysis has now quantified: 4.577 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO₂e) annually — against the 3.9 million tonnes recorded for ExxonMobil’s entire UK operations in 2023, according to Ember’s UK largest emitters data. The two sites are not yet built. Neither has yet received a final Development Consent Order. But gas turbines designed for 20-to-25-year operational lifetimes would still be running in 2050 — the year the UK is legally required to reach net zero.
Why the Grid Can’t Keep Pace — and Why Gas Fills the Gap
The engineering mechanism driving this situation is not a planning failure in the ordinary sense. It is a structural mismatch between the speed at which AI compute demand is materializing and the speed at which high-voltage grid infrastructure can be built.
Grid connection applications surged from 41GW in November 2024 to 125GW by June 2025 — tripling in under seven months — with datacenter projects accounting for the bulk of the growth, according to Ofgem’s July 2026 consultation. The National Grid’s transmission system was not designed to absorb that volume of new industrial load in that timeframe. Connection offers that were once expected in months now extend to years.
For a developer planning a 300-megawatt (MW) or 720MW campus, a multi-year grid wait is commercially untenable. On-site Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) generation — the standard industrial gas power technology — can be permitted, constructed, and operational far faster. It produces stable, dispatchable electricity. And it produces greenhouse gas emissions using the same fossil fuel that has powered UK industry for generations.
Using the government GHG conversion factors, Foxglove applied that methodology to both sites’ full planned capacity and arrived at 4.577 million tonnes per year. A government spokesperson described the figure as “misleading,” arguing that both sites would not operate at 100% utilization from day one. Tom Hegarty, Foxglove’s head of communications, replied that 100% utilization is standard industry practice for long-term emissions assessments of infrastructure investments. Kierra Box, a trade and environmental regulation campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said the aim of any datacenter is to increase load and run at full capacity, making peak-utilization projections “valid to look at.”
The more fundamental point, as Sam Hunter-Jones, a lawyer at the environmental litigation nonprofit ClientEarth, observed, is structural: “Every megawatt powering a datacenter connected to the grid is a megawatt that could not be used to replace fossil fuels elsewhere. The reality is that unchecked datacenter growth is making the transition away from fossil fuels harder, not easier.”
Wapseys Wood and Quest Park: Projects at the Eye of the Storm
Wapseys Wood — formally designated the SDC M40 Campus — sits on a Veolia-operated landfill site near Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire. The proposed development comprises three datacenter halls drawing 300MW of IT load, backed by a dedicated on-site gas “energy centre” capable of supplying up to 350MW of generation. The site already generates a modest 7.5MW from landfill gas; the proposed expansion would increase that by nearly fifty-fold, as confirmed in Wapseys Wood’s NSIP planning status coverage.
Quest Park, on the site of a former clay quarry at Ampthill Road, Stewartby in Bedfordshire, is a £9.3 billion (approximately $12.68 billion USD) development by real estate firm Questpit. The 143-acre (57.9-hectare) campus plans four datacenter buildings with a total IT capacity of up to 720MW, combining a grid connection with its own on-site gas generation. Its developers describe it as sitting on “the spine of the UK’s emerging compute corridor,” roughly 35 minutes from central London, and claim it would “meet around a third of the UK’s current datacenter demand.”
Both sites were designated Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) — a planning status that routes development consent decisions away from local planning authorities and directly to central government ministers. Datacenters only became eligible for NSIP designation in January 2026, under the NSIP regulations for datacenters January 2026. The new regime allows developers to apply for a Development Consent Order (DCO), with the relevant Secretary of State making the final call. For both Wapseys Wood and Quest Park, DCO applications remain under review and no final decision has been issued.
Campaign groups, including Foxglove and Global Action Plan, have described the NSIP fast-track as insulating the projects from local democratic oversight. Separate joint NGO parliamentary written evidence submitted by a coalition including Beyond Fossil Fuels, Foxglove, Friends of the Earth, Global Action Plan, and the Green Web Foundation estimated that the Wapseys Wood gas turbine alone would produce 532,696 tCO₂e annually, citing nearby air quality concerns for two local primary schools and a hospital. Caroline Lucas, the former England and Wales Green party leader, described the projected emissions as “absolutely horrifying” and said the NSIP regime “insulates” large projects from the local scrutiny they would otherwise face, according to Guardian reporting on the Foxglove analysis.
Donald Campbell, Foxglove’s director of advocacy, was blunter about the underlying dynamic: Wapseys Wood developers had made “no effort to dress the project up as environmentally friendly,” and if the bulk of pending gas-grid applications were approved, “climate pollution from big tech will go through the roof.”
Gas Lock-In: Why This Is an Engineering Problem, Not Just a Policy Debate
The Foxglove analysis is politically explosive, but the deeper challenge it surfaces is engineering rather than merely political. Gas turbines built for datacenter service are not temporary infrastructure. CCGT units typically operate for 20 to 25 years before major overhaul or replacement becomes economically rational. A gas-powered datacenter commissioned in 2027 or 2028 would, under normal operational assumptions, still be burning gas in 2050 — the year the Climate Change Act 2008 net zero legally requires the UK to reach net zero.
Britain’s Parliament passed the Seventh Carbon Budget on June 24, 2026, setting a legally binding cap of 535 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent for the 2038–2042 period — equivalent to an approximately 87% reduction from 1990 levels, as recommended by the Climate Change Committee Seventh Carbon Budget. That same day, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) published its annual CCC 2026 emissions progress report, finding that the government “is not moving fast enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” and that the UK’s current delivery plan leaves a 26 MtCO₂e gap against the 2030 Paris Agreement target.
If Wapseys Wood and Quest Park — which together would emit 4.577 million tCO₂e per year — are built as currently proposed, their combined annual output alone would consume more than 8.5% of the entire national carbon allowance for the 2038–2042 period. That is not a marginal rounding error; it is a structural constraint on what every other sector of the UK economy is permitted to emit. Oliver Hayes, head of policy at Global Action Plan, made the implication explicit: “The only way the rapid rollout of datacenters could fit within these budgets is if other elements of the economy were given much stricter carbon budgets,” as noted in Global Action Plan’s parliamentary evidence.
That tradeoff — decarbonization burdens shifted from AI infrastructure onto housing, transport, and industry — is precisely what the CCC and the Environmental Audit Committee have been pressing Energy Secretary Ed Miliband to quantify. In correspondence to the EAC in February 2026, Miliband acknowledged that his department’s modeling “accounts for potential emissions from data centres through our projection of overall electricity demand growth,” while also conceding that “future demand from data centres, and interaction with wider energy system demands, remains inherently uncertain.”
Ofgem’s Fee Proposal: Addressing the Queue, Not the Gas
The grid regulator Ofgem launched a consultation on July 29, 2026 targeting the speculative applications clogging the connection queue, with the stated aim of flushing out projects that have no realistic prospect of being built. The proposed mechanism is a Data Centre Commitment Fee: a refundable deposit of between £237,500 and £712,500 (approximately $324,000 to $972,000) per megawatt of requested capacity, paid when a developer accepts a connection offer and forfeited if the project later withdraws from the queue. For a 500MW facility reserving capacity at the high end of that range, the fee would reach approximately £356 million (approximately $486 million USD) — enough, Ofgem argues, to concentrate minds among developers with no genuine construction timeline.
Eleanor Warburton, Ofgem’s director for energy system design and development, said the existing queue risked “slowing down projects that are ready to proceed, while also making it more difficult to plan future network investment efficiently.” The Ofgem consultation open until September remains open until September 16, 2026.
What the fee does not address is the carbon consequence of developers who, precisely because they cannot get into the clean grid queue on a viable timeline, have already decided to build on-site gas generation. Wapseys Wood and Quest Park are pursuing gas power not because they failed to apply for grid connections but because the queue itself makes clean-power timelines incompatible with commercial AI infrastructure development. The Ofgem fee reforms could reduce speculative queue-filling; they cannot reverse gas investment decisions that are already underway.
The underlying mismatch — 73GW of datacenter demand applications against a grid built for 45GW peak consumption — will not be resolved by a fee structure alone. It will require either a physical expansion of transmission capacity on a timeline that has not yet been announced, or an explicit policy choice to constrain the pace of datacenter development to what the decarbonizing grid can actually serve. The government has so far declined to make either commitment.
A Legal Precedent That May Reshape the Sector
The Ofgem consultation is not the only regulatory pressure bearing on the sector. In January 2026, the government conceded that its own approval of a datacenter at Woodlands Park, Buckinghamshire — granted on appeal in 2025 — was legally unsound, acknowledging what officials described as a “serious logical error”: planning permission had been granted on the basis of environmental mitigation measures that were not, in fact, secured within the consent itself. A legal challenge brought by Foxglove and Global Action Plan was granted permission to proceed on all grounds, including whether carbon emissions from running datacenter hardware must be assessed at the environmental impact screening stage, as analyzed by Burges Salmon’s planning EIA analysis, and the government conceded Woodlands Park approval error.
That procedural ruling, if it reshapes EIA practice across the sector, could significantly complicate future NSIP applications. Toby Perkins, the Labour MP who chairs the Environmental Audit Committee, said the Foxglove emissions analysis published Tuesday was “a potent reminder that without the right measures in place, data centres could represent a serious threat to the environment and to our legally binding climate goals,” according to Guardian reporting on the Foxglove analysis.
The committee’s broader inquiry — launched after Miliband’s letter — has sought to answer Perkins’ own stated question: “Will data centres power the UK’s economic growth? Perhaps. But what kind of implications will they have for energy and the environment?”
The Foxglove arithmetic suggests the government’s current answer — that multiple pathways exist to reconcile rapid datacenter growth with the Seventh Carbon Budget — requires something the government has not yet provided: a credible, publicly auditable accounting of where those budgetary offsets will come from, and which other industries will absorb them.
Global Pattern, Local Consequences
The pivot to on-site gas generation is not unique to the UK. In the United States, hyperscale technology companies have moved aggressively to secure their own power generation. Meta Hyperion Louisiana gas plants — 10 natural gas plants in total — are being built to serve a planned campus in Louisiana that could eventually draw up to 5 gigawatts of computing power. Microsoft West Texas gas power deal has similarly secured gas-fired generation for a facility in the American Southwest under a 20-year agreement with Chevron.
In Britain, the localized consequences are more concentrated. The Wapseys Wood gas turbine sits adjacent to two primary schools and a local hospital whose communities will bear the immediate air quality effects of burning large volumes of gas on-site, as noted in Global Action Plan’s EAC submission evidence. The East Havering Data Centre Campus, flagged by Foxglove in a separate Guardian analysis published on August 21, 2026, would occupy 218 hectares (539 acres) of green belt land and carry a carbon footprint equivalent to roughly 27,000 flights from London to New York per year, as the East Havering datacentre carbon footprint Guardian analysis reported.
Martha Dark of Foxglove framed the systemic challenge plainly: “It is difficult to see how the government plans to reach its manifesto commitment of hitting net zero by 2050 when it is approving construction projects that add the impact of a major regional airport to our annual emissions.”
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero maintained its position that datacenters are “a vital part of our economy and our everyday lives” and that the government would “enable the development and growth of new industries, such as datacenters, by building unprecedented amounts of clean power.” It did not address the specific arithmetic of how 4.577 million tonnes of annual gas-fired emissions from two projects alone will be accommodated within legally binding carbon budgets that Parliament passed just two months ago.
Exchange rate as of August 26, 2026; conversions are approximate.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhy are AI datacenters in the UK using gas instead of renewable electricity?
Britain’s national electricity grid connection queue has grown faster than the grid can accommodate new demand. Applications for grid connections surged from 41GW in November 2024 to 125GW by June 2025, with datacenter projects alone accounting for roughly 73GW of that backlog — nearly double the UK’s peak national electricity demand of around 45GW. Waiting years for a clean grid connection is commercially unworkable for large AI infrastructure projects, so developers like those behind Wapseys Wood and Quest Park are building their own gas-fired power stations on-site to start operating immediately. The result is that AI infrastructure growth is, in effect, being powered by a fossil fuel workaround to a grid capacity crisis.
What does it mean that two datacenters would “out-pollute ExxonMobil” in the UK?
The global energy thinktank Ember recorded ExxonMobil’s total UK greenhouse gas emissions at 3.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO₂e) in 2023. Foxglove, applying the UK government’s own published conversion factors for gas-fired electricity generation, calculated that the Wapseys Wood and Quest Park sites together would emit 4.577 million tCO₂e annually when operating at their planned capacity. That is not a comparison of the two companies’ global footprints — it is a comparison of the projected annual UK-specific emissions from two planned datacenter campuses against the total UK operations of one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. The comparison is notable precisely because datacenters are not conventionally classified as fossil fuel infrastructure.
Can individuals or communities have any say in these datacenter approvals?
Yes, but the window is narrow. Both Wapseys Wood and Quest Park are being processed under the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) regime, which routes planning decisions away from local authorities and to central government ministers. However, the Development Consent Order (DCO) process includes a six-month public scrutiny period during which any interested party — including local residents, community groups, and campaign organizations — may submit evidence and objections for the Planning Inspectorate’s consideration before a recommendation is made to the Secretary of State. For the Wapseys Wood application, that scrutiny window is currently open. Separately, Ofgem’s consultation on grid connection reforms remains open for responses until September 16, 2026.
What is carbon lock-in, and why does it matter for the UK’s climate targets?
Carbon lock-in refers to the long-term emissions commitment created when fossil fuel infrastructure — in this case, gas-powered Combined Cycle Gas Turbine generators — is built with operational lifespans typically running 20 to 25 years. A gas turbine commissioned in 2027 or 2028 would, under normal commercial assumptions, still be operating in 2050, the year the UK is legally required to reach net zero under the Climate Change Act 2008. Britain’s Parliament passed the Seventh Carbon Budget in June 2026, setting a legally binding emissions cap of 535 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent for 2038–2042 — roughly an 87% reduction from 1990 levels. Gas-fired AI infrastructure built today would still be emitting in 2050 and consuming a significant portion of the nation’s remaining carbon allowance in the years immediately preceding the net-zero deadline. Once built, it cannot easily be switched off ahead of schedule without stranding substantial capital investment.