BTG Eddisons hosts UKREiiF fringe roundtable on data centre development

As part of UKREiiF 2026, BTG Eddisons' Senior Director Javid Patel joined planning and economics consultancy Third Revolution Projects and law firm Fladgate LLP at a fringe roundtable session on how energy infrastructure is shaping the next wave of data centre developments. The session, “Powering Growth: Unlocking Data Centre Development Through Energy Infrastructure”, brought together developers, investors, landowners and operators working on live schemes across the UK.

The format was deliberately stripped back so attendees could provide insight into what is actually happening on the ground at a moment when grid constraints, community expectations and surging demand from AI and cloud workloads are all reshaping the economics of high-energy development.

Why the conversation is timely

Data centre construction has become one of the most active investment stories in UK commercial property, and government appetite is matching it. One contributor noted that there are 29 consecutive schemes in motion right now, with the caveat that "expectations are high from the government, and people need to be clear about what they want." Parts of the UK that are, as the room put it, still feeling their way through what is a genuinely new frontier.

The constraint is rarely the land. It is the power: how quickly a connection can be secured, on what terms, and whether the scheme can support the kind of longstanding operator commitments that funders need to see. Three things came through in the discussion:

• Data centres need to be more flexible in their power requirements, not less.
• Just because a site has land and a power supply, that does not mean it has a plan.
• The schemes moving fastest treat energy strategy as a first-order design question, not a late-stage workstream.

Behind the meter, and beyond standalone

A recurring theme was the role of behind-the-meter generation, colocation, ambient loops and private wire arrangements in unlocking sites that would otherwise sit stranded behind a grid queue. Decentralising power is increasingly seen as the route to minimising operational risk whilst also creating the jobs and infrastructure that allow more communities to share in the benefits, rather than concentrating both load and value in a handful of mega-sites.

The room was also direct about a structural problem. Data centres are still too often commissioned as standalone developments, when they would thrive as part of mixed-use schemes – sitting alongside housing, employment space and ambient loops that can put waste heat to productive use. The economics of treating data centre land as employment land, with all the planning and placemaking that follows, was a thread that ran through the afternoon.

Local authorities, masterplans, and sovereign data

The other recurring point was the relationship between operators and local authorities. The schemes that are landing well are the ones where the local authority has come in early. Seed-funding masterplans, joining up site allocation with grid and water infrastructure, and treating the data centre as part of a wider economic strategy rather than a one-off planning application were all suggested as ways to improve delivery.

What to watch

The session closed with an open question rather than a tidy conclusion: how quickly the planning system, grid operators, local authorities and the data centre industry can settle into a shared language on what a viable site actually looks like. The roundtable format will continue beyond UKREiiF, with follow-up conversations planned in the coming months.

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