The UK data centre industry has hit out at Labour Party plans to freeze consumer energy prices, claiming that the knock-on effect of Ed Miliband’s pledge could cripple the sector.
With power costs already soaring in the UK, the industry fears that any price freeze will stifle investment from energy firms, risking the threat of so-called “brownouts”, when the power supply dips, potentially closing data centres altogether.
Hundreds of thousands of businesses are heavily reliant on UK data centres, from Experian and Acxiom to Spotify and Oracle, and the boss at one of the UK’s largest operators claims Labour’s plan “will make a bad situation worse”.
“Our energy bills are already expensive and they are only going one way, and that’s up,” said Onyx chief executive Neil Stephenson, whose business operates five data centres in the north of England and Scotland.
Stephenson fears that Miliband’s intervention will give power companies little incentive to invest in new capacity if they are going to be capped on what they charge and forced to produce power at a loss. “You are not going to invest in a market if the prices are not allowed to go up,” he said.
According to the latest UK figures, in 2012, data centre power requirement was 2.85 gigawatts and is growing at more than 20% a year; a gigawatt is the amount of energy it takes to power about a million homes. The sectors of the economy that account for the largest proportion of the UK data centre asset base included IT services, finance, public administration and telecoms.
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Data centre chiefs warn of crippling effect of energy price freeze http://t.co/oSKqkAw5dI #datamarketing #data #directmarketing