Where a new data center could connect to the grid today. 3,584 substations ranked by deliverable capacity, alongside grid supply point limits, transmission connections, retiring plant and 602 existing data centers. Select a substation to see its grid, market, planning, cooling and connectivity position.
Capacity and market demand rarely sit in the same place. The East of England and South Scotland hold the most headroom, about 4.1 GW each, but the East has 117 data centers in its pipeline against 26 in South Scotland. South Wales has the least headroom, 1.2 GW, with 23 projects queued against it.
Sites contract roughly four times what they draw.
Everything else is in the search box on the map: networks (ukpn, ssen), levels (primary), sizes (1-5MW), layers (outages, power stations) and filters (greenbelt, water). Click the box for suggestions. Power & connectivity analysis →
| Substation | Network | Level | Available | Connectability | Contested | Status |
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Brownfield land councils have identified as suitable for development, ranked against deliverable capacity. Bands connect differently: a small site takes a supply from one substation, a large one depends on what the grid supply point behind it can deliver.
| # | Site | Acres | Nearest substation | Deliverable | Within 5 km | To exchange | Ownership | Signals |
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Power reaches a site through a chain of equipment, each with its own limit. Published headroom is only one of them.
Published demand headroom less offers the network has already accepted. Published, not estimated.
Capacity offered to others but not yet accepted. Uncommitted, but someone else asked first.
If every outstanding application converts. With one applicant this is the outcome to plan against.
The lower of Free now and the grid supply point’s own headroom. This is the headline.
No network measures spare capacity directly. Each one derives it from firm capacity less demand, using its own assumptions, so figures are comparable in direction rather than to the megawatt. Two differences matter when reading this page. Accepted and offered capacity is diversified at Northern Powergrid: it is scaled by connection type, about 0.8 for industrial, because no customer draws its full agreed capacity, so 400 MVA in the queue may appear as roughly 190. The other networks publish the raw figures. Grid supply point capacities are estimated: those assets belong to the transmission owner, not the distribution network, so the networks approximate them. Reinforcement dates are the transmission owner’s, and how much capacity a reinforcement releases is not published. Confirmed with Northern Powergrid, 17 September 2026.
Roughly three in ten megawatts offered are accepted: 0.273 at UK Power Networks, 0.299 at Northern Powergrid and 0.340 at SP Energy Networks. The rate holds across a portfolio but says little about a single decision. 460 sites have one outstanding application and 443 have two or three. Those sites report the floor or a range, because a single application either converts or does not.
UK Power Networks publishes 5.4 million half-hourly readings from about 100 operating data centers. Mean load factor is 13–29% of agreed capacity: 23.7% for colocation at HV, 28.9% for enterprise and 13.2% for colocation at EHV. Sites contract roughly four times what they draw. That inflates the queue, adds capacity charges and makes non-firm connections more viable than the headline megawatts suggest.
Every figure here describes capacity imported from the public distribution network. That is one route to powering a facility. A site with little or no grid headroom may still be viable through:
Scale matters as much as route. Only 11 sites can deliver 100 MW+ from the grid; 970 can deliver 1–5 MW. The median of 4.7 MW is thin for a campus and ample for a distributed build, so use the scale filter rather than reading one headline figure as a verdict.
Straight-line distance from each substation to the nearest PeeringDB exchange facility with 10 or more member networks, and to the nearest major exchange with 100 or more (LINX LON1, LINX LON2, LONAP, LINX Manchester). It is not route distance and says nothing about fibre at the site. Sites more than 100 km from a major exchange get a carrier diversity check in their next steps.
SP Energy Networks publishes one headroom figure for a group of substations and repeats it on each substation in the group. Totals, medians and counts on this page count each group once (3,584 of 3,979 listed substations). The map still shows every listed location.
Available is published demand headroom, less accepted offers, capped by the grid supply point above it. Contested is capacity offered to others but not yet accepted.
Covers UK Power Networks, Northern Powergrid, SP Energy Networks, NGED and SSEN Distribution across 13 licence areas. Electricity North West is not included: it restricts its capacity heatmaps. SSEN publishes headroom in MVA, which is shown here as MW, and a site that shares capacity with another network shows as 0 where SSEN gives no figure. SSEN sites carry no flood, green belt or water screening yet. Flood zones and green belt cover England only. Every figure is a snapshot of what a network can accept, not a connection offer, and takes no account of the works or cost of connecting. Capacity only shows as contested once an offer has been made, so a site already under discussion can look clear. Verify before relying on any figure.
See the full methodology and diagram →
A snapshot of what each network can accept, not a connection offer.
Bigger sites connect at higher voltage and draw the smallest share of what they contract for. Colocation at EHV runs at 13.2%, against 23.7% at HV, so the largest connections are the most over-specified.
Source: UK Power Networks. Latest data is April 2026: UK Power Networks has paused updates to this dataset. Full load profiles →