- World
- Sep 10
Data centres pose growing threat to electricity systems globally
• Use of data-intensive technologies, in particular artificial intelligence (AI) data centres, is growing faster than electricity infrastructure can handle, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) has warned.
• The rapid expansion of data-intensive technologies such as hyperscale data centres has significant implications for energy system reliability and resilience.
• This is in addition to important implications for infrastructure investment, water and land use, economic development, digital sovereignty, and local communities.
Mismatch between demand and supply
• Data centre consumption is expected to almost double by 2030 – from 485 Terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025 to 950 TWh by 2030, equivalent to three per cent of global demand, according to the intergovernmental International Energy Agency (IEA).
• Investment in data centre infrastructure worldwide, on the other hand, is forecast to roughly double only by 2050 – from around $800 billion per year in 2026 to $1.8 trillion per year in 2050.
• The UNECE warns that in many regions, data centres and other energy-intensive facilities are being built much faster than the power grids needed to supply them.
• A large facility can often be built and connected within two to five years, but expanding transmission lines and other grid infrastructure can take more than 10 years because of lengthy planning, approval and construction processes.
• One of the worries is that overloading electricity systems could cause voltage oscillations, unintended disconnections, and cascading failures.
• This is already happening in some extreme cases, in systems that depend on renewable energy sources.
• Electricity demand from AI data centres is volatile and can spike unexpectedly. Grids that rely on renewable energies cannot adjust in real time.
• This mismatch between demand and supply has led several countries to take energy-saving measures to prevent overloading their national networks.
• Ireland, which has one of the highest concentrations of data centres in the world, has introduced connection restrictions in Dublin, and the Netherlands has introduced constraints on where data centres can be built.
• In the United States, large loads, particularly data centres, are projected to drive significant increases in equipment demand and supply chain pressures by 2030.
Need greater regulation and coordination
• Connecting large data centres can require significant infrastructure investment, but there is no consistent framework determining how these costs should be divided between data centre developers, electricity companies and consumers.
• Without clear rules, necessary investment may be delayed.
• Regulatory gaps also persist over where data centres should be located. Power-intensive facilities continue to cluster in areas offering favourable connectivity and regulatory conditions, concentrating demand in places where local grids may not have the capacity to support it.
• Regions with low-cost electricity may attract large-scale computing, but cheap energy alone does not ensure durable economic benefits.
• Environmental regulation is also beginning to expand beyond electricity consumption to the wider impacts of data centres on water use, emissions and local resources, but UNECE warns that these rules remain too fragmented.
• Regulators also lack sufficient information about how large facilities use electricity in real time, making it harder to anticipate their impact on the grid.
• Over the long term, data centres, especially AI-oriented facilities, should be assessed not only through grid adequacy and emissions, but also through macroeconomic, distributional, sovereignty, and environmental perspectives.
• Without deliberate policy design, countries risk using scarce electricity to generate externally captured AI value while absorbing infrastructure costs and labour-market impacts domestically.
• In all, UNECE is calling for greater regulation and coordination to ensure the long-term reliability and resilience of what are increasingly essential energy systems.