A New Fee Attaches a Price Tag to Every Megawatt Requested
Ofgem opened a consultation on July 29, 2026, proposing a Data Centre Commitment Fee that would require GB data-centre developers to post a returnable financial security of GBP 237,000 to GBP 712,500 for every megawatt of grid import capacity they request. The money is forfeited outright if the project fails to energise on the schedule it committed to when accepting its connection offer. The consultation window is short: it closes September 16, 2026, twelve days from today.
The fee targets a specific slice of the pipeline. It applies to unenergised data centres of 40 megawatts or more, whether the connection sits directly on the transmission network or runs through a distribution network paired with a Transmission Entry Assessment. Ofgem's consultation places the DCCF inside the National Energy System Operator's wider Curate program, the framework NESO is using to manage a UK grid connection queue that has swollen well beyond what the transmission network can physically absorb.
The Bond Has to Stay Live From Acceptance to Energisation
The security is not a one-off payment that clears once posted. Burges Salmon's analysis of the proposal notes that a developer has to keep it fully in place, as a letter of credit, a bond, or cash, continuously from the moment it accepts its connection offer until the day the data centre actually energises. Whoever provides that instrument needs a minimum credit rating of A- or equivalent, which rules out a cash guarantee from an entity that a bank or insurer would not rate as close to investment grade.
The numbers scale quickly once a project moves beyond a small facility, as the figures below show.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Fee range per MW of import capacity | GBP 237,000 to GBP 712,500 |
| Example: 100 MW project at the low end | GBP 23.7 million at risk |
| Share of average GB data centre capex | Roughly 2.5% to 7.5% |
| Minimum credit rating required | A- or equivalent |
| Applies to projects of | 40 MW or more, unenergised |
Even at the bottom of the range, a mid-sized 100 MW facility faces GBP 23.7 million locked up as forfeitable security, a sum Burges Salmon puts at roughly 2.5 to 7.5 percent of an average GB data-centre project's total capital cost, tied up for the entire construction period before a single rack goes live.
Ofgem Casts the Fee as a Filter Against Speculative Capacity
Ofgem's consultation frames the DCCF as a response to a queue problem rather than a revenue measure. Developers have historically been able to reserve grid capacity years ahead of an actual build, and NESO's Curate program exists to sort real projects from speculative placeholders that occupy queue positions other developers could use sooner. A forfeitable bond, in this reading, gives a developer a direct financial reason to request only the capacity it genuinely intends to use and to hit its own energisation date.
Burges Salmon's analysis treats the anti-speculation rationale as credible on its own terms while flagging what it costs to enforce: a fee sized as a meaningful fraction of total project capex, applied uniformly regardless of who is posting it. That uniformity is where the design choice starts to matter more than the stated goal.
The Real Effect Is a Credit-Rating Gate on the AI Buildout Queue
The DCCF is framed as a neutral tool against speculation, but in practice it does something more specific: it shifts the financial risk of a stalled or cancelled connection off the grid and onto the individual developer's balance sheet, then prices that risk in a currency only some developers can pay in. Posting GBP 23.7 million or more as a continuously-live financial instrument turns into a credit-rating question, because the minimum A- threshold decides who can supply that instrument at all.
A hyperscaler with an investment-grade balance sheet treats that bond as a rounding error against its capital program and keeps its place in the queue without friction. A smaller AI infrastructure startup or a regional cloud or colocation operator, doing the same 40 MW or 100 MW project, now needs investment-grade financing just to hold a queue position, not to build anything yet. The result is a UK data-centre pipeline that concentrates further into the hands of the operators who already have the largest balance sheets, and it concentrates for a reason that has nothing to do with which of them designs or builds the better project.
Smaller Developers Are Already Objecting Before the Deadline
Industry stakeholders responding to the consultation are raising a version of the same concern from the other direction. Burges Salmon's analysis notes that developers and their advisers are flagging that the fee structure disadvantages smaller and non-investment-grade developers specifically, the group least able to absorb a multi-million-pound bond sitting idle for years of construction. Some are already discussing whether a project can avoid the mechanism altogether by generating its own power on-site rather than drawing the disputed grid capacity, or by building the same data centre in a jurisdiction that does not price queue speculation this way.
None of that resolves before September 16, 2026, when Ofgem's consultation window closes. What Ofgem decides to keep, adjust, or drop from the current GBP 237,000 to GBP 712,500 range will set the entry price for a UK grid connection for every AI and cloud infrastructure project sized 40 MW or larger that follows.
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