The problem with waiting
Britain’s grid is being rebuilt for a renewable future, and that work matters. But the National Grid’s Great Grid Upgrade is a programme measured in decades, and the connection queue ahead of it is measured in years. Some applicants are being offered dates in the 2030s.
Digital infrastructure doesn’t move on that timescale. AI training runs, HPC workloads, and the businesses behind them need power now, at a price that makes the economics work. A grid connection offer for 2035 is a huge restriction on the UK meeting it’s AI growth goals.
Our solution is in response to this.
What is a private wire?
A private wire is a dedicated physical connection between a generator and a consumer, bypassing the public network entirely. The electrons that power our facilities travel a few hundred metres from a renewable generator, not hundreds of miles across the transmission system.
In practice, that means three things:
Speed. No transmission connection queue. Our build timeline is set by construction, not by a grid offer letter.
Cost. Power priced at or near the generator’s cost of production, without the network charges, balancing costs and supplier margins stacked into a standard grid tariff.
Provenance. The renewable claim is not a certificate purchased against power drawn from a mixed grid. Rather, it is the actual generator, visible from the site.
The economics
Renewable generation, hydro especially, produces some of the cheapest electricity in the UK once built. A big issue for a data centre operator is that their cost advantage gets eroded by transmission and distribution charges, policy costs, and retail margin.
Private wire strips that stack out. We negotiate directly with the data centre operator, agree a long-term power purchase arrangement, and pass the resulting price stability through to their clients. For compute-intensive workloads where electricity is the dominant operating cost, the difference compounds with every kilowatt-hour.
Long-duration price certainty is also worth more than simple numbers on a spreadsheet. Grid power prices are volatile; a fixed-price private wire arrangement turns this largest variable cost into a known quantity for the life of the contract.
Genuinely green, not certified green
Most “100% renewable” claims in the data centre industry rest on certificates. The facility draws from the same grid as everyone else, then buys REGOs to match its consumption on paper.
That accounting has its place, but it isn’t what our clients increasingly need to demonstrate – to their boards, their customers and their regulators. Hourly-matched, physically traceable renewable supply is becoming the standard against which serious sustainability claims are judged.
Private wire clears that bar by construction. When your power arrives on a dedicated line from our hydro sites for example, the question of where it came from answers itself.
How we site our facilities
We don’t choose locations and then go looking for power. We start with the generator.
Scotland’s hydroelectric resource offers something rare: established, dispatchable renewable generation in locations with land, water for cooling and communities that benefit from new economic activity. Our development model co-locates modular data centre capacity directly alongside these assets, with private wire connections from the outset.
Hydro offers an additional advantage over wind and solar: it generates power around the clock. That baseload character is a natural fit for compute workloads that run 24/7, reducing dependence on storage or backup generation to bridge intermittency.
What this means for you
If you’re a data centre operator, an HPC or AI business, or an enterprise weighing up where your next tranche of compute should live, the offer is straightforward:
- Capacity delivered on a timeline set by construction, not the connection queue
- Power costs anchored to renewable generation, with long-term price visibility
- A sustainability story you can evidence physically, not just contractually
- UK jurisdiction, UK data residency, and partnership with the communities that host us