Energy and infrastructure are key for UK investment
The UK government has completed a consultation for its 2035 industrial strategy, and Peter Rolton, executive chairman of engineering consultancy Rolton Group, held a series of roundtables to gather stakeholder views on what they hope to see when it’s published.
“Power and infrastructure has become absolutely key for the real estate world, particularly as we’ve seen the growth of data centres,” says Rolton. “In terms of scaling, a car factory might be 15 megawatts. A gigafactory would be 150. A data centre, 1.1, 1.2 gigawatts. So we’re seeing now this huge monster infrastructure requirement honed into view.”
AI data centres have been declared infrastructure of national importance and are “absolutely also at the core of this new industrial strategy with the creation of AI data zones.”
“For clients, it’s really important to think about this as a really long-term play. The sort of power that we’re talking about is just not very readily available, and to get National Grid to sort of start to deliver that, you’re talking about anything three-, five-, even ten-year-bit programmes.”
Rolton says they’ve been “talking today with local authorities and regional authorities about the need to create infrastructure plans for regions that will actually enable that infrastructure to be brought forward so it essentially becomes shovel-ready to attract that inward investment. And that’s going to be really, really important.”
“No-one wants to come, find a site, and then wait three to five years. They’re just going somewhere else. So getting that infrastructure front-loaded is absolutely vital now for this conversation.”
