Britain Remade

In his conference speech, Burnham proposed building more council homes on unused council land. Councils own lots of land, but how much of it is suitable for building? @FionualaMc investigates how much of it could be built on in Manchester. samdumitriu.com/p/how-much-u…

The logic for restricting domestic gas production never made sense. Here’s 12 quick thoughts on why opening Jackdaw to drilling is the right call. samdumitriu.com/p/the-logic-…

How building data centres could cut Britain's sky-high electricity bills by billions: - Failing electricity use has made electricity more expensive as a fixed costs of supplying power (grid, policy, balancing, etc.) are concentrated on a small share of demand. - New demand from data centres helps dilute those fixed costs. This could save £2bn a year (£69 per year) if the Government's compute target is hit. - Data centres are extremely profitable, even at high power prices. They care about speed, but the grid queue can create decade-long delays. Letting companies pay to jump the queue could raise billions. - Britain could replicate the success of spectrum auctions and sell-off faster grid connections. Accelerating 3GW by 3 years is potentially worth £12bn to data centre builders! - In the US, tech companies are making large investments in new generation (SMRs, gas, renewables) as states adopt 'bring your own power' policies. Doing the same here could accelerate clean power buildout and fund necessary gas plant renewals. samdumitriu.com/p/build-the-…

I bust some myths about water and data centres.

NEW: How the push to ban data centre construction in Britain is based on sloppy research. One paper widely cited in the media and by the Green Party contains multiple howlers: - It claims that a single data centre will be responsible for 8% of the East of England's water shortfall. This is wrong by a factor of almost 100. - It suggests data centres are to blame for England's predicted 5bn litre daily water shortfall. Yet under the most water-hungry assumptions, new data centres would account for less than 3% of it. Under more realistic assumptions, it's just 0.5%. - It compares global AI water withdrawals with British household water consumption. But these are completely different things. Most withdrawn water is returned to its source. The comparison exaggerates AI's water footprint by around ten times. - It repeatedly uses worst-case estimates of data centre water consumption, ignoring that many data centres use little or no water for cooling. One of its sources is literally titled Overestimating AI's water footprint. The real cause of Britain's water shortages isn't data centres. It's our failure to build reservoirs. samdumitriu.com/p/will-data-…

I was on @bbc5live discussing Andy Burnham’s plans for GB Grid. Here’s my take: Britain's grid has become a serious barrier to growth. Factories, data centers, and even homes can face really long waits for a connection. We're talking 5, 10, even 15 years waiting for a grid connection, and that queue is actually growing. Giving businesses the freedom to build their own connections to compete with the privatised monopoly strikes me as a sensible reform. If the detail is right, we could unlock a lot more investment into the grid and do that in a much more nimble way, cutting that queue down. The test, I think, for GB Grid is whether or not it actually increases competition and speeds up delivery, or they just end up as another layer in the system. Burnham talks a lot about public control, but the reality is the state already has a really big say in what does and doesn't get built and how much National Grid invests. National Grid already operates within 5-year regulatory settlements. They produce endless PowerPoints to persuade regulators to let them build this or that, and when things change during those settlements, they are not typically nimble. Creating a new publicly owned company won't fix those incentives, but if it can support that competition, that could be a good thing. The challenge is making sure that Great British Energy really has the capacity to deliver that. I'm a bit skeptical. I think it might be able to move some cash around, but we have lots of different bodies that can do that already. What we're not seeing is the return of the Central Electricity Generating Board that built the grid in the first place. I think connections are only part of the problem. We need to reform our energy market more generally. We need to make sure that both generation and large users have those incentives to locate where the grid has capacity. We spent loads of money building wind farms in places where the grid connection is just a constraint. As a result, it means that they produce power, but it can't get to where it needs to go. We need to change the incentives around that. The government rejected, under the previous prime minister, the idea of locational pricing, which essentially said that power should be cheaper where it's being generated and gave people an incentive to build where demand is, or to move demand to where generation is. I think there are other things we can do on grid connections for businesses. If you're a certain business, time really is money. Data centers in particular really, really want to be able to get access to the grid, and they're willing to pay a lot. I think, potentially, it would not be crazy that you could see data centers paying in the billions just to speed up their grid connection. That money could end up going to subsidising everyone else's bills or paying for that broader grid buildout. There are some positive steps here, incremental steps. We need to go further in this direction, but we also need to look at a wider reform of the grid.

Why doesn’t Britain have as many trams as France and Germany? Answer: Cost. We pay roughly twice as much to build a kilometre of track. (And some projects cost a lot more!) Why is it so expensive? One challenge is the cost of moving wires and pipes. Our kit is older, badly mapped, and water/power companies get to pass the cost of utility diversions to the taxpayer when we try to build trams. We also need to move more because we have deeper track-beds. Today, I visited Coventry where they are trying a new approach known as ‘Universal Track’. It only goes 30cm (I.e. a school ruler’s length) deep, unlike existing approaches that go 60-90cm deep. That’s above most utilities in most place. It also uses less concrete. They reckon it’s much cheaper as a result. Potentially half the cost of a normal track. It was originally invented for their smaller ‘Very Light Rail’, but they’ve since learnt it’s strong enough to take full-size trams. They hope to have it commercially available in two years.

My latest for @spectator on the avoidable mistakes and unlearnt lessons that explain how it can take three years and cost £237m to upgrade a single railway bridge. spectator.com/article/why-do…