Datacentre projects in Britain will be forced to pay hundreds of millions of pounds to plug into the power grid under proposals to tackle a growing electricity connection logjam. Ofgem, the sector watchdog, said it was taking action to discourage “speculative” datacentre projects from causing unnecessary delays to the grid connection queue, which includes hospitals, schools and housing developments. The energy system operator’s most conservative forecasts for Great Britain’s datacentre capacity by the end of the decade stand at 3.7GW, and their top-end estimates are 6.7GW. The government’s own “compute roadmap” calls for “at least 6GW of AI-capable datacentre capacity by 2030”. Concerns over datacentre grid connections are not confined to Britain.