Power In

The grid is rationing its scarcest asset on a number it already knows is wrong. UK Power Networks publishes half-hourly utilisation for every data centre on its distribution network. We pulled the full record: 96 sites, more than five million readings since January 2023. The median site drew 18% of the capacity it had contracted. The twelve largest connections, the ones holding the most network capacity, ran at a median of 7%. Nearly half the sites never once topped 40% of what they booked, even in their single busiest half-hour in three years. UKPN’s own pre-publication assessment expected exactly this. Across these sites the contracted position overstates measured demand by roughly five to one on average draw, and by better than two to one even at each site’s single busiest half-hour in three years.

Priority in the queue goes to whoever booked the capacity, not whoever will draw it. Freight, with an overnight duty cycle about as far from speculative as demand gets, waits behind reservations the meters say are mostly air.

It waits because the demand is coming on a clock the UK doesn’t set. An operator swaps a working diesel when the electric truck’s total cost of ownership drops below it, and not a month before. That crossover is being set abroad: battery and hybrid trucks outsold diesel in China for the first time in December 2025, and the export product is a cheap heavy electric truck now moving into Europe. When the crossover lands, a fleet on a five-to-seven-year refresh cycle doesn’t trickle over. It turns at the cycle, and a large slice of it can move inside one or two buying rounds. An 11 kV depot connection takes eighteen to thirty-six months even in a market that works. Wait for the trucks before planning for the power and the trucks win the race. You build ahead of the curve, or you build late and dear.

And it waits unnamed. The strategic architecture being built on the Planning and Infrastructure Act puts data centres in the title and AI Growth Zones in the plan. EV charging hubs get one mention, in one consultation’s introduction, as an example of what could benefit. Freight depots get none. The £4.5 billion of transmission reinforcement National Grid asked Ofgem for in June 2026 covers new generation, industry and data centres. EV charging isn’t mentioned. The power to prioritise freight exists in statute and reaches distribution, exactly where depots connect. It’s been switched on since March, when the first plan was designated, and that plan is a generation plan. Nothing freight-shaped runs through it. Freight is unnamed in the frameworks that confer priority. And it’s unprotected: the reform’s anti-speculation gates were built to catch speculative applications, and a haulier electrifying a depot it has run for thirty years is the opposite of speculative.

This report runs on one claim, bounded by one admission. The binding constraint is the mechanism. Most of the grid freight needs is already buildable and fundable under the rules as they stand; what stalls it is how capacity gets allocated, prioritised, priced and scheduled. The bound: this is not a promise that every depot connects. Fixing the mechanism unlocks the subset worth connecting, identifies the residual that never will be on economic terms, and routes that residual to shared and public infrastructure instead of pretending it away. How the depot-versus-public split lands is a range, held open on purpose, between the networks’ forecast that puts all charging on depots and DfT’s model that puts 92% on public hubs. The evidence doesn’t justify resolving it either way.

What we’ve produced is a set of fixes, and the first is to the cost case, because it has been told wrong. Under the fully-shallow regime in force since April 2023, wider reinforcement is already socialised. The operator’s real bill is the sole-use last mile. So the headline ask isn’t a new fund. It’s prioritisation and scheduling, delivered through a model we call LEAD, Logistics Electrification Ahead of Demand: model the logistics-dense clusters, designate the qualifying criteria through the same route generation already runs on, and split the funding so socialised reinforcement runs through the networks’ ED3 plans and only the sole-use connections need a fund at all.

Four asks come out of it, set out in full at the close. One has a live route today: mandate the offer of flexible and ramped connections for depot charging, through the Connect pillar of Ofgem’s demand-connections reform. The demand side already wants it; 81% of respondents to NESO’s demand call for input said they’d accept a non-firm, ramped or phased connection for an earlier date. The other three follow: put transport decarbonisation inside the strategic-alignment criteria, make the reforms proportionate for the brownfield owner-occupier, and give commercial tenants a statutory right to install charging where they pay for it.

Three questions stay open, and we say so rather than paper over them. The switching date, when each operator retires its diesels, is the genuine unknown, and it’s the sector’s question to answer. The depot-versus-public split is held open on purpose. And the asks rest on timetables the sector doesn’t control. These aren’t gaps we hide. They’re the work that’s left.

The trigger is foreign and the date is fixed. The only thing in the sector’s gift is whether the grid is ready to meet it. Today it isn’t. This report is the case for changing that before the trucks arrive.