Ofgem, Britain's energy regulator, opened a consultation on Wednesday 29 July proposing a Data Centre Commitment Fee of £237,500 to £712,500 per megawatt (MW), the million-watt unit in which grid capacity is measured1. The fee falls due when a developer accepts a grid connection offer. It is refunded when the site energises and forfeited if the developer walks away, so a one gigawatt campus would post up to £712.5 million simply to hold its place.
That range works out at 2.5 to 7.5 per cent of average project cost. A developer holding options on ten speculative sites must now finance ten deposits, and must separately evidence financial capability, commercial maturity and procurement activity to keep its position in the connection queue, the ordered list of projects waiting for a slot on the transmission network. The consultation closes on 16 September and sits inside the Demand Connections Reform programme run by the National Energy System Operator (NESO), the independent body that plans and operates Britain's electricity system.
Ofgem published its own trigger figure. Demand connection applications across Britain rose from 41 GW to 125 GW between November 2024 and June 2025, at least 80 GW of it data centres2. That is a wider and later measure than the roughly 50 GW of transmission-level data-centre requests on the register we reported on 27 February, and the two are a progression rather than the same count restated. Ofgem's judgement is that much of the 125 GW will never be built and is displacing projects that would.
Holding a queue place has until now been close to free, which is why developers banked options across multiple sites and left the grid operator carrying the uncertainty. OpenAI put UK industrial electricity at more than four times US and Nordic rates when it paused its North Tyneside site. The fee adds a second cost, earlier in the decision, to a country already losing on the first one.
