Britain exports enough power to run Ireland's data centres: half its entire 2030 gas allowance

Britain now sends Ireland more power than all of Britain's own data centres use. Both islands share the problems behind it: slow wires, high bills and clumsy post-Brexit trading.

What connects Dublin and Slough? Not a Ryanair route. About 12 terawatt-hours a year of servers, and a gigawatt of British electricity flowing west most evenings to help keep them humming.

At 8pm on 24 July 2026, Britain's grid operator did something it had not done all year. Margins were tight, so NESO cut the capacity Britain could offer for export to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway to zero. At the same moment, about a gigawatt was flowing the other way across the Irish Sea, to the island of Ireland, as it does in almost every hour of the year.