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Radlett Wire
Hosted by Steve Bowbrick · EN
For over ten years - since way before everything went weird - we've been droning on about Radlett and the Hertsmere Parliamentary constituency
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The Sir Oliver Dowden sketchy behaviour monitor, part three
Mar 10Tap to summarizeA pay rise for MPs – and a really big one for Sir Oliver Dowden How much money is it appropriate for an MP to earn while he continues to sit in the House of Commons? How much of his time can he reasonably devote to outside work? Does it matter that this MP is spending half of his time working for financial companies and more than a week per month working for a foreign firm? We don’t have good answers to these questions. It’s all permitted under the rules and the MP in question, The Right Hon. Sir Oliver Dowden KCE CBE, scrupulously declares everything. What do you think? Leave a comment. Sir Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality We were reminded to return to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, almost a year after our last visit, by the news that MPs are to receive one of their regular big pay increases. UK MPs, we learn, are “dealing with higher levels of complex casework, and abuse and intimidation” so they must have a pay rise. A pay rise of 3.5% plus a 1.5% ‘benchmarking adjustment’, in fact, bringing the base salary for an MP to £98,599 per year, starting in April (by the end of this Parliament they’ll be earning £110,000/year). Of course there are some MPs who’ll barely notice. Sir Oliver Dowden KCB CBE, for instance, whose annual income is currently running at about £420,000 per year (including that boosted MP’s salary, less than a quarter of his annual income). Most of Sir Oliver’s income, these days, comes from three sources: EmployerBusinessDays/monthMonthly salaryFrancisco Partners ManagementAmerican investment firm7£11,667Pierce ProtocolsArt market2£10,000Caxton AssociatesHedge fund1£5,00010£26,667 In all three cases, Sir Oliver’s function is described in vague terms as ‘advisory’. He’s paid for varying amounts of advice: for Francisco Partners, a San Francisco-based tech investment firm, it’s currently seven days per month. For Pierce Protocols, a London-based art services firm that runs an art investment marketplace under the Heni.com brand, it’s two days per month and for Caxton Associates it’s one – adding up to a total of ten working days per month. We know Sir Oliver to be a very hard-working MP, certainly not one to shirk his duties as a member of Parliament, but should his constituents be concerned that he’s now essentially a part-timer? The UK Parliament is famous for the usefulness and accessibility of its web site. It’s a paragon of transparency and accessibility, admired around the world. They win awards for it. For some reason this doesn’t apply to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests which, unaccountably, is still presented as a Byzantine maze of PDFs, with no way to organise or compare information. It’s all manual. Funny that. More about Caxton Associates – an interesting firm that was also closely involved in the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss in this earlier post. Here are part one and part two of the Oliver Dowden Sketchy Behaviour Monitor. Bookmark Sir Oliver’s entry in the register of members’ interests and his page at They Work for You. Here’s all of our Oliver Dowden coverage on one page and if you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to this feed. We tweet this stuff and you’ll also find us in the Fediverse – search Mastodon for ‘Radlett Wire’.
Transcribe →Hertfordshire County Council elections – preview
Apr 27, 2025Tap to summarizeHonestly, is there anything more boring? We’re struggling to think of anything. County Council elections have none of the obvious glamour of the national contest, the stakes are lower and – let’s face it – nobody knows what they do (quick, make a list of five things that your county council is responsible for! No Googling! See?). Click here to go straight to the bit about Radlett, the Watling electoral division and Caroline Clapper, our councillor. Who are the candidates we can vote for here in Radlett? CandidatePartyGus ChannerFE college teacher, ex-military, lives in RadlettReformCaroline ClapperIncumbent, professional politicianConStuart HowardChartered accountant, lives in RadlettLibDemSatvinder Singh JussAcademic, barrister, lives in RadlettLabourCheryl StungoCroxley Green parish and Three Rivers borough CouncillorGreenCandidates in Watling division, Hertfordshire County Council, 1 May 2025 But, this time around, there is expected to be some drama. Drama, of course, provided by yellow-corduroy man of the people Nigel Farage: principle bringer of chaos in British politics for almost twenty years. So we won’t just ignore this contest as we usually do (seriously, we’ve been previewing elections here for over ten years and we’ve never done a county council election). So here’s a short overview of the contest, starting with the national picture and then zooming in to Hertfordshire and to the Watling division in which we live. What are we voting for? Elections are taking place in 14 county councils, eight unitary authorities and one metropolitan district (also the people of the Isles of Scilly are voting – but they have their own, very odd system). Nine councils currently busy with ‘unitarisation‘ programmes have been allowed to put their elections back a year. Here in Radlett (in the Watling electoral division – they’re not called ‘wards’ in county elections) we’re voting to send one county councillor to Hertford to represent us: nothing else. We’re not voting for borough or parish councillors (and there’s no unitary mayor in our area so that’s not relevant). More about all that below. Reform rampant? Of the 25 county and unitary councils holding elections, 16 have a Conservative majority and, of the six where there is no overall majority, three have Conservative leaders and three Liberal Democrats. Labour controls only one. Consequently, although the headlines on 2 May will probably be all about Reform’s surge, the actual electoral damage will be suffered almost exclusively by the Conservatives. Nigel Farage is still going around disingenuously predicting 200 seats for his party but the polling tells another story. This fancy MRP poll, conducted by Electoral Calculus for the Telegraph, suggests 697 seats for Reform, which is more than then expect for the Tories. Ouch. The postponement of elections in nine areas may or may not have the side benefit of letting incumbent parties in those authorities off the hook with regard to the swing to Reform – but it’s quite possible they’ve just deferred the inevitable and that electorates will punish them when the elections do happen. The Electoral Calculus poll supports this idea and puts Reform comfortably ahead of the Tories in the councils where elections have been postponed. The government and the authorities who’ve opted for postponement claim only the most innocent, bureaucratic motives but, let’s face it, electors are pissed off that they’re not getting their chance to vote this year and are unlikely to have forgetten in a year’s time. Looking further ahead – to the next general election – liberal, anti-polarisation think tank More In Common, using a similar MRP statistical method, suggests essentially a three-way tie between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform, with Reform narrowly winning. Dramatically, in their projection, in 285 Parliamentary seats the winner would secure less than a third of the vote – finally demolishing the protective wall provided for the main parties by the first-past-the-post system. Double ouch. And here? In Hertfordshire, after the last local elections in 2021, things looked like this: Data from the BBC In the four years since that vote the kind of drift that you see between elections has caused four councillors (one Conservative, two Liberal Democrats and one Labour) to drop their party affiliation and become independents. One Tory switched to Reform last month and will cheekily be standing for that party next week. Another complicating factor for the Tories here is that almost a third of their councillors are standing down this time around, including some cabinet members. Obviously, a swing to Reform large enough to displace the Tories in Hertfordshire would be a real political earthquake but it’s worth noting that the Tories in the county currently have fewer seats than at any time since 2001 (there have been boundary changes since then but they’re not significant). Likewise Labour, which in 1993 actually took 30 council seats in Hertfordshire (three more than the Tories at that election) has been reduced in recent years to a pretty pathetic six councillors. With Liberal Democrats and Greens also expecting a surge at this election, both major parties are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been in Hertfordshire. Watling along We don’t know much about where our readers come from. Our web hosting company gives us some confusing data that suggests that about a third of you are in China (if you are one of our Chinese readers, please leave a comment. We’d honestly love to know what you’re doing here). But, in the meantime, we’re going to assume you live and vote in the Watling electoral division in Hertfordshire. It’s a pretty big area, stretching all the way from the London border in Edgware to the edge of St Albans and taking in the whole of Radlett, Aldenham, Letchmore Heath, Elstree and a chunk of Borehamwood (we’re also excited in a childish way to note that Watling has its own airport). <img loading="lazy" decoding="async"...
Transcribe →The Sir Oliver Dowden sketchy behaviour monitor, part two
Apr 18, 2025Tap to summarizeIn which we ask what happens to an MP’s priorities when three quarters of his income comes from his second (and third) jobs? Show him the money! UPDATE: 20 April 2025: Sir Oliver’s new favourite football team San Diego FC got absolutely clattered 3-0 at Charlotte, finishing with ten men after some VAR drama. And it was a very long flight home for the San Diego boys. Not quite as long as Sir Oliver’s back in March, though, obviously. Watch the match highlights. As we’ve explained before, once an MP is out of government, they can do pretty much whatever they want to earn money. There’s a body, set up and funded by Parliament, called the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), that tells ministers what they may and may not do on leaving office but it essentially boils down to “wait for a few months…”. ACOBA has no way of stopping a former minister or senior civil servant from taking up a new role but has been known to write a stern letter (see the cases of Sue Gray, who actually did what they told her to do, and Boris Johnson, who didn’t). Sir Oliver Dowden has now left ministerial office twice – once while in government and once because of last year’s general election defeat. On each occasion he did the right thing, asked ACOBA for advice and was told to wait three months before taking up his new roles. You won’t be surprised to learn that, in both cases, he waited exactly three months before starting his new jobs. Dowden is nothing if not loyal and it turns out that the work he’s taken up this time around is with the same employers as last time around (we wrote about them back then). He’s back with ‘global macro hedge fund’ Caxton Associates (intriguingly, the people who funded Liz Truss’s petulant insurgency) and with art broker Pierce Protocols (doing business under the name Heni Leviathan which seems sort of appropriate when you consider the modern Tory Party’s commitment to reducing the nation to a state of nature). Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality There’s more money involved this time, though. Dowden has spent almost his entire Parliamentary career getting by on his MP’s salary plus – once appointed in 2018 – the larger ministerial salary (there was about a month of outside work while he was briefly out of the cabinet in 2022) but now that he’s free to do so he’s dialing up the dough. Again, it seems important to note that Dowden’s behaviour here is not exceptional: in the 2019 Parliament over 90% of income from second jobs went to Tory MPs – some of whom have been known to pull down nearly a million pounds per year from one second job or £2.5M in one Parliament or, in the case of the acknowledged master of the art of the second job, Boris Johnson, a million pounds from multiple jobs in one month. Sir Oliver’s income, so far, barely touches the sides. His most recent declaration says that he’s now pulling down a total of £20,000 per month from the above sources (£10,000 from each). That’s 2.5x his MP’s salary and, added up, brings Dowden’s total declared income to £331,346 per year. At the top we wondered, in the sub-head, what happens to an MP’s priorities when this kind of money starts to flow into the bank account, making the sums coming from the day job look a bit silly. Well, of course, we don’t know. And we definitely don’t know what effect all this new money is going to have on Sir Oliver Dowden in particular. We do know that he’s been a professional and diligent representative for his Hertsmere electors for almost ten years – making speeches next to bins without complaint. So, in a sense, what we’ve got now, with Sir Oliver out of office and finally bring in the big money, is a kind of experiment: what happens when you give an elected representative a boost to his earnings equivalent to 2.5 times his basic salary and 6.5x the average wage in the UK? Is it possible that all that wedge will have no effect at all? Is it even slightly plausible that his priorities will not shift? That he won’t find himself thinking more favourably of his main employer and acting in their interests or in the interests, more broadly, of the business they’re in? While in his ministerial role in the last Tory government Dowden was earning around £150,000 per year (and he’ll have received a severance payment of £16,876 on leaving that job last year). There must be a measure of relief for Sir Oliver in finally being able to join the high earners’ club. For his whole political career he’s been surrounded by the super-rich. The generation of Tory MPs he’s a member of is one of the wealthiest in history and he was usually in a tiny minority of non-millionaires in the cabinets in which he sat. The fact that, as a diligent bagman, he often wound up on Sunday morning TV defending the indefensible behaviour of his millionaire colleagues must have been especially galling. San Diego FC 0-0 St Louis City But let’s get to the most intriguing declaration in Sir Oliver’s latest update to the register. It’s not the most valuable – it’s a trip to a football match – but this football match wasn’t down at Meadow Park in sunny Borehamwood. It was at the Snapdragon Stadium in sunny San Diego, 5,500 miles further West, on 1 March. We assume Dowden travelled with his family. At least it’s difficult to imagine how he could have spent £9,217.79 on flights and £1,851.27 on accommodation on his own (plus £462.81 for transfers and £617.12 for match tickets and hospitality). This is another benefit of being out of government: you can stock up on freebies without the kind of examination that government ministers get when they go to the football. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="341" src="https://radlettwire.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/image-8-1024x341.png" alt="Promotional graphic for San Diego vs St Louis football match" class="wp-image-3403" srcset="http://radlettwire.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/image-8-1024x341.png 1024w, http://radlettwire.co.uk/wp-cont...
Transcribe →DC01UK: data centre drama
Apr 4, 2025Tap to summarizeIt’s a few months since we learnt that Europe’s biggest data centre might be built here in Hertsmere – what could stop it from happening? In part three of our DC01UK deep dive we’ll look at the various obstacles that must be overcome before it goes live on the Internet in 2030 (some updated information about AI chips and Donald Trump’s sanctions on China added to this post on 8 May 2025). It might fall at the first hurdle. The scheme has outline planning permission from Hertsmere Borough Council so the developers must get their ducks in a row and submit a final plan. If we’re honest, though, this doesn’t look like a major concern: the council has given the project its enthusiastic backing and the UK government has cleared the way by adding data centres to the list of developments that can be defined as nationally significant infrastructure projects, alongside energy, transport, water, waste water, and waste projects (Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has even mentioned DC01UK in a speech). Unless something else goes wrong, the project is probably guaranteed to happen. So what else could go wrong? The neighbours might object. As with any big development – especially one planned for land that is 100% in the green belt – local people are upset about DC01UK and have begun a campaign. Sadly for the locals, though, this scheme is going to be very hard to stop. As we said in an earlier post, this is the kind of land Angela Rayner calls ‘grey belt’ and even the green belt lobby seems to have given up. Our MP has met with the local campaigners but it doesn’t sound like he was able to give them much hope: “I encourage residents to submit their own views on the matter directly to the council,” he says. The fact that the developers plan to leave half the land as green open space and have promised substantial enhancements to the local environment will not help the opposition’s cause. The demand might not be there. The trigger for DC01UK – and hundreds of projects like it all over the world – was the massive surge in demand for data centre capacity that we wote about in our first post, almost entirely the product of the AI and machine learning revolution – apparently an unstoppable and unarguable fact of the modern world. But the launch, only two months ago, of a new large language model (LLM), from a Chinese firm called Deepseek, suggests the direction for AI might not be quite as ‘up and to the right’ as had been hoped by investors. Deepseek wasn’t supposed to be possible. Biden era sanctions (including a three-tier provision called the AI diffusion rule that was meant to come into force on 15 May) limited the sale of the most powerful versions of the specialist chips needed to train and run serious LLMs to Chinese firms. NVidia developed a special, less powerful version of its primary AI chip, the H100, in response to these limitations. The shock was that Deepseek was trained on these deliberately-limited chips. That a group of brilliant computer scientists was able to coax top-tier AI performance from second-tier hardware suggests that this might not be the brute-force business we thought it was to begin with. And since we wrote this paragraph the Trump administration first announced and then withdrew plans to limit further the kind of chips that manufacturers like NVidia can export to China; then went further and announced that the AI diffusion rule will not now be enforced at all and that individual, bilateral deals will be done for the export of specialist chips. The Deepseek engineers made such resourceful use of the hobbled chips’ capacity that they were able to get around the punitive sanctions regime and keep China in the AI game. And, more to the point, if one Chinese firm can make more efficient use of AI hardware then the American giants, then so can anyone. Suddenly the AI game doesn’t look so one-sided and the soaring demand for newer and faster hardware doesn’t look so nailed-on. If more really can be done with less, then maybe the world doesn’t need the vast additional computing and data centre capacity that’s now being built. So do we think that the spreadsheets that justified DC01UK’s grand plans have been dragged to the trash? No, we don’t. The underlying growth in demand for the kind of cloud services that run in data centres like this one is unabated – and most of it has no need of LLMs – but has the gloss come off the AI data centre business? Just a bit. We’d like to have been a fly on the wall in a post-Deepseek DC01UK planning meeting that’s for sure. An even more dramatic shift in the AI balance of power could result from the fact that Chinese manufacturer Huawei (the subject of much political hysteria here and elsewhere a few years ago) has just begun shipping test versions of its own AI chips, thought to be at least as powerful as the NVidia kit and, obviously, not subject to sanctions. China might be about to become a full-fledged AI superpower on its own terms. Will this development alter the investment priorities of the users or UK data centres? Who knows. It’s the water stupid. 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Transcribe →DC01UK: a demanding new neighbour
Mar 18, 2025Tap to summarizePreviously on Radlett Wire: two local firms have secured outline planning permission to build Europe’s biggest data centre right here in Hertsmere. We don’t know much more than that. For instance we don’t know who the final client is or who will use the facility once it’s live. Likewise, we have only the most basic information about the facility itself. If you know more than we do about any of this or if you have anything you’d like us to know about the development, leave a comment under this post or email DC01UK@radlettwire.co.uk. So, in this, the second post in our DC01UK deep dive, we’ll look at what we don’t know and what we should be keeping an eye on as this development proceeds. In the next post we’ll look at the bigger trends – in business, geopolitics and in AI – that might stop it from happening all together. Later we’ll look at the reaction of the affected communities: the people of Potters Bar and the settlements around it who will have to put up with this huge construction project and its long-term operation. Seven key measures The data centre business is a mature one. The first dedicated facilities built specially to host computer servers in Britain actually precede the Internet – built mainly for businesses in the City of London – and are now almost forty years old. The industry, over the years, has developed a pretty complete set of standards and measurements (mostly simple ratios) that are used to compare facilities and to judge efficiency. As the development progresses we can use these ratios to work out whether DC01UK is doing a conscientious, thoughtful job or just chucking up a big dumb data barn. As neighbours and Hertsmere electors we think we have a right to hope that this development is clean, efficient and up-to-date – especially as the project appears to be a fait accompli in planning terms (National and local government have signed off on it and expect it to go ahead). At the moment, though, we’re going to have to rely on a fair amount of guesswork because they’ve told us hardly anything (next to each measure we’ve put an indication of how much we know now, in italics – hopefully this will change as the development proceeds). ElectricityPUE (power usage effectiveness) basic informationThis is the biggie, obviously. Data centres draw more electricity than almost any other kind of industrial facility and they’re the fastest-growing power draw on the grid right now, almost everywhere. Recent developments (crypto and now AI) have accelerated this growth. The only useful datapoint we’ve got from DC01UK so far relates to electricity use and it’s a helpful one because we can use it to calculate some of the others. The original announcement from Hertsmere council says that the National Grid has reserved a 400MVA substation for the facility. That translates quite precisely into a peak power draw of 360MW. St Albans, for comparison (population 150,000), draws about a third of that – 135MW. DC01UK is going to be huge. WaterWUE (water usage effectiveness) unknownData centres get very hot (put your hand round the back of your computer and feel the heat it’s putting out – now multiply that by millions) and they’re cooled these days using a mxture of conventional air-conditioning and water pumped through the servers. Although no figures for water use have been published we can use the electricity figure to calculate that if it’s built to current cooling standards DC01UK will need about 250 million litres per year. That’s about 660,000 litres per day, a vast multiple of the water needed by the agricultural land it will be built on, to state the obvious. Eastern England is one of the most water-stressed parts of Britain and already experiences shortages in dry spells. ‘Zero-water’ data centre cooling systems exist – they recycle cooling water instead of just allowing it to evaporate. Can we expect a system like this from DC01UK? CO2CUE (carbon usage effectiveness) unknownThis is a measure of how much CO2 is emitted per unit of IT energy consumed in the data centre. The lower the CUE the better the environmental performance. This is another factor for which we have no figures at all. The developers will have to calculate this number and they may already have done so. A CUE of 0.0 is possible but only if 100% renewable electricity is used. In a developed economy a figure of 0.2 is more likely. In the UK where there’s no coal in the energy mix but where there’s still a lot of gas, the number is likely to be between 0.1 and 0.2. It’s going to be fascinating to see DC01UK’s figures once they’re public. Energy reuseERE (energy reuse effectiveness) unknownThis one’s closely related to the CO2 figure above and to the heat figure below. If energy is used efficiently and not wasted – if heat from CPU cooling is reused elsewhere in the building, for instance – the CUE will come down. 1.0 is the worst here; it means all the energy that’s not used is wasted. A number lower than that indicates greater efficiency. Renewable energyREF (renewable energy factor) unknownIn Britain in 2025 (and certainly in 2030 when DC01UK is meant to be finished) there’s no reason why electricity for a single facility like this one shouldn’t be from 100% renewable sources. Likewise there’s no reason why electricity, once generated, shouldn’t be stored – either on-site or elsewhere – to improve efficiency and reduce cost. It’s another unknown but perhaps the presence of a green energy business in the DC01UK partnership might help here. HeatHRE (heat reuse effectiveness) unknownIn Britain we tend to heat our homes individually, using gas boilers. Elsewhere, especially in Europe, buildings or whole districts are heated from a single source. So, it’s probably a bit unrealistic to expect that the spare heat produced by DC01UK be used to heat homes in South Mimms and Potters Bar. It’ll probably just be vented to the air. Heat reuse effectiveness (HRE) is a simple percentage – what proportion of the heat generated is re-used? The most efficient industrial heat sources in the world, including some data centres, achieve HREs of above 50% – less than half of waste heat is thrown away. Unless the DC01UK developers have a surprise in store for us – perhaps a groundbreaking plan to heat local housing or greenhouses – then we expect this to be a very low number: somewhere between 1 and 5%. LandLUE (land use efficiency) basic informationThis is another calculation that’s fairly easy to do, so we can make a decent guess at how efficiently this data centre will use the land allocated to it. Dividing the published figures for the power draw of the DC01UK data centre (360MW) by its area (93,000 sqare metres) and assuming a 75% usage rate gives us just below 3 kW/m², a measure which puts it in the high efficiency category for all buildings but somewhere in the middle for a data centre. It will be fascinating to learn just how ambitious the developers intend to be. There’s an irony in the fact that the best possible way to cool a huge computing facility like DC01UK would be, well, to build it somewhere else, somewhere really cold to be specific – somewhere like Northern Norway or Alaska. Cooling is then effectively free – you just find a way to let the cold air from outside in (and once you’ve warmed it up you make sure you’re not just venting it back to the outside but using it to heat the housing estate or the university next door). And it doesn’t need to be in the arctic – simply moving your datacentre seven or eight degrees North – say from Potters Bar to Stockholm – would reduce the cooling costs of a 360MW data cantre ...
Transcribe →DC01UK: Hertsmere steps into history
Feb 4, 2025Tap to summarizeWell, possibly. Data centres are the cotton mills and steel foundries of our day. Vast, industrial-scale facilities that are right at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution. And one might be built right here, next to the motorway in South Mimms. One of those visualisations that developers churn out. More here. We’ll admit to a certain childish excitement about this. Mysterious developers want to build Europe’s largest data centre right here in Hertsmere. The developer applied for planning permission in September of last year and last week the council granted outline permission for the development. We suspect they’re as excited as we are, although there’s some doubt as to how involved Hertsmere can now be, given the special status of this development. We’ll be keeping an eye on this project and we’ll provide as much detail as we can as it progresses but, to begin with, here’s what we know so far: Are you serious? On the green belt? The data centre, if built, will be on green belt land to the East of South Mimms services, right next to the M25. The developers are in luck, though: this is exactly the kind of relatively-unloved green belt that the government has recently been calling ‘grey belt‘. You might expect a plan to build on 85 acres of agricultural land in a district that has a history of green belt belligerence to produce an angry reaction (like the one that held up the Radlett Railfreight terminal for years) but when even Peter Waine, chair of the Hertfordshire branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, speaking to the BBC, can’t muster more than: “It may not be the most wonderful and beautiful green belt but it is green belt…” Here at Radlett Wire, at the other end of Hertsmere, we get the strong feeling this particular chunk of green belt may not be long for this world. Inside the red outline It’s going to be huge. The claim, in the news stories and press releases, that DC01UK will be the largest data centre in Europe looks narrowly defensible – but we’d be surprised if it’s still the case once it’s actually finished. Europe’s largest running data centre is presently in Portugal. It covers about 800,000 square feet and the proposed South Mimms operation is aiming for two million square feet – although it will be built in phases. But there’s another project, in Newport, Wales, that’s also aiming for two million and, anyway, the critical measurement – especially for the local community – is probably not square feet. Planners and architects use a measure they call gross external area (GEA), which is more useful. It’s the total area of a building, including all floors, measured from the outside. It’s the critical measurement used for rating, council tax and planning. DC01UK’s GEA is 187,000 square metres, slightly more than the 185,000 square metres (2,000,000 square feet) that will be devoted to computers. And as we’ll explain, there are other important numbers – relating to water and electricity use and to pollution – that we should understand and keep an eye on. But size isn’t everything. If completed (big question!) – and if not eclipsed by other projects along the way – this puts DC01UK just inside the top ten biggest data centres in the world, but it’s an extremely volatile market, and brutal and connected directly to the financial performance of the companies that use these facilities. Data centre capacity is a commodity – like bauxite or wheat. The biggest firms (Google, Amazon…) build and run their own but most data centre capacity is bought and sold by intermediaries or brokers. A business that needs servers for a new app is concerned only with cost; margins must be hair-thin, effiency constantly improving. So, honestly, how this plays out, between now and the proposed opening date in 2030 is anybody’s guess. Whatever happens, as you’d expect, this enormous facility is already well-and-truly dwarfed by the biggest. A single Chinese data centre, operated by China Telecom, is already over five times bigger than DC01UK and sits on a campus called the Inner Mongolia Information Park in Hohhot, China alongside several other enormous facilities (truly visible from space). Also, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the seventh largest data centre in the world is buried in the side of a mountain in Utah and is operated by the United States National Security Agency. It’s safe to say that, although you’ve never heard of it, it knows a fair amount about you. Another one of those visualisations. Who will own the data centre? Guess what: we don’t know. We know a bit about the company set up to see it through planning, DC01UK, but nothing about the facility’s final user nor even its ultimate owner. This project is, according to Computer Weekly, a joint venture with local house-builder Griggs and Chiltern Green Energy, neither of which – I hope they won’t mind me saying – are what you’d call giants of the information age. The Register, a UK tech news web site, says it will ultimately be used by one of the ‘hyperscalers’ (industry jargon for the handful of tech giants in a position to make use of such a huge facility) but that the usual suspects – Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta – all declined to comment. This is not surprising. The big firms are typically secretive about their data centres: these are, to state the obvious, business-critical, round-the-clock facilities and ‘uptime‘ must be protected at all costs. Amazon, in particular, treats its data centres as if they were national security assets and <a href="ht...
Transcribe →First mover
Dec 1, 2024Tap to summarizeThere might be a by-election in Hertsmere in the new year. Reform UK is the first to have noticed Boom. First out the gate. Reform UK is distributing leaflets in Hertsmere in anticipation of a by-election in the new year. Candidate Darren Selkus’s letter to electors says: If the rumours prove true and Oliver Dowden is granted a peerage in the New Year Honours, it would trigger a by-election right here in Hertsmere. With Labour still in power and the Conservatives in opposition, this presents a unique opportunity for a free vote – a vote for real change, a vote for Reform. We haven’t heard the rumours Selkus cites, but we have been speculating for a while that Dowden might not relish the prospect of a whole electoral term in opposition. So, it’s relevant that the Tories have spent the last 14 years packing the red benches; enobling, well, practically anyone, as far as we can tell. The long list of peers they’ve advanced includes the millionaire PPE entrepreneur, the son of a former KGB agent (spending his dad’s money freely in London and in Umbria), the mysterious ‘adviser’ no one can remember and the ‘chief of staff’ who worked for Liz Truss for less than a month. They’ve done this at a greater rate than any government in modern history (we’ve just learnt that these are called malverisation appointments). And it’s not just peers: Conservative governments since 2010 have given ten times more knighthoods and damehoods to MPs in 14 years than Labour did in 13. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to call this out-of-control patronage. They have no shame. Peer explosion So will Sir Oliver – who scored his knighthood in the final hours of the Sunak government (and picked it up this week at Windsor Castle) – move along the corridor to the Lords in the new year? We’re not so sure. He’s still a young man and the private sector must beckon (although, of course, he might not have much choice in the matter and there’s nothing to stop a peer of the realm from moonlighting at, say, a Mayfair hedge fund). The operator Darren Selkus (his social media profile image) We’re quite impressed by military veteran Darren Selkus. He’s an operator. His communication with electors is savvy (and he says that, if elected, he’ll give his MP’s salary to charity, something that at least one of the party’s new MPs is already doing). He suspects he can increase Reform’s vote share at a by-election because voters have greater freedom when they know they’re not selecting the next government (in his letter he calls it a ‘free vote’). Vote share won by parties of the populist right in Hertsmere since 1983 We know this to be true in by-elections – turnout is lower and minority parties can gain share. It’s an intriguing equation. Can an insurgent party have an impact in a home counties seat like ours, between general elections, when the Tories are so firmly embedded? At the July election Selkus won 6,584 votes (just short of 14% of the vote) – more than UKIP at their 2015 high-point and the largest vote for the populist right in the history of the constituency. He must be absolutely beside himself at the prospect of closing the gap at the right-hand end of the chart a bit. Cheers (CC image by Steve Bowbrick) His party’s leader is, by a mile, the most successful British politician of the 21st Century. His relaxed manner, his defiance of silly parliamentary norms and his sure-footed disregard for electoral law have secured for his party a solid and pretty defensible 15% of the national vote. It remains to be seen if a shamelessly, almost defiantly, upper-class character like Farage can get past this percentage while striding around the country in those mustard-yellow cords, though. More to the point, while the whole hierarchy o...
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