Infrastructure Planning Blog

This week's entry covers data centres becoming nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs) and other Planning Act 2008 related news.

Data centres become NSIPs

Data centres have become potential NSIPs as of 8 January 2026. The statutory instrument that did so can be found here.

I say 'potential' because they are not compulsory project types that must use the regime but can opt into it.  This is of course in the context that soon nothing will be absolutely compulsory as it will be possible to apply to opt out of the regime once section 4 of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 is brought into force.

This has been achieved simply by adding 'Data centres' to the list of business and commercial projects that are able to opt into the Planning Act 2008 regime if they are considered nationally significant.

'Data centres' are not defined, but back in September 2024 technology minister Peter Kyle MP declared data centres to be 'critical national infrastructure' for the purposes of national resilience. The press release describes data centres as 'the buildings which store much of the data generated in the UK'. Note that this is not the same as the 'critical national priority' designation for some energy NSIPs.

You might think data centre size would be measured in bytes with some huge metric prefix, like quettabytes, but in fact they are generally measured in megawatts (MW), because the size of the electricity supply is the critical factor that determines their capacity.  The largest data centre in the UK currently is probably the Virtus London5 centre in Slough, which is 90MW, but larger ones are under development and the situation is quite dynamic.

Contracts for difference allocation round 7 results

The results of the seventh ‘contracts for difference’ allocation round were announced this week. This is where renewable energy suppliers get the difference between the price they sell electricity for and the declared ‘strike price’ from the government-owned Low Carbon Contracts Company, to give them sufficient certainty and predictability to develop their projects.

All projects on the list are offshore wind farms, including the decided DCOs Awel y Mor and Norfolk Vanguard and the awaiting decision Dogger Bank South, all at a strike price of £91.20 per megawatt hour.

Record year for DCOs

2025 was a record year for granted Development Consent Orders (DCOs), with 24 being given consent – the previous record was 19 in 2022.  It’s still a bit short of the average 30 per year needed to hit the 150 by the next election target, but encouraging nonetheless.

There was a wide variety of consents (probably the widest so far): two airports, two energy from waste, one gas-fired power station, five offshore windfarms, seven solar farms, one harbour, four highways, one ‘other’ (i.e. non natural gas) pipeline and one waste water project.  A collective pat on the back to the infrastructure planning sector!

The cloned examining authority

Finally, I was intrigued by this week's Rule 6 letter for the 180km Norwich to Tilbury overhead line application, since two days after the preliminary meeting there is an open floor hearing at 10am in Orsett, Essex and another one at 11am in Norwich. Will the ExA split themselves with some attending each, all attend virtually or create avatars like Abba Voyage? Time will tell.

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