Energy & Data: The Self-Sufficient City

Energy & Data: the self-sufficient city

Power and data face the same problem. The resilient city answers both on site.

Hannah Staunton, Director of Partnerships UK, Hover Energy

A modern city runs on two things it does not make for itself: power and data. Today both are generated elsewhere, owned and delivered through connections the city does not control and cannot do without. And as I write, that dependence still underpins almost everything we build.

Take the grid. In the UK, a high-capacity connection can take years to secure and comes at a price that climbs as the network fills, with planning delays and local opposition adding further friction. In most of the UK the network is simply full. The power that eventually flows through that connection is among the most expensive in the developed world, a cost that must absorbed to avoid abandoning a project. Once connected, a place’s power and ability to keep running depends on assets it does not own and cannot reach if something goes wrong.

Data is moving the same direction. Capacity is tight, the major markets are full, and the prevailing model asks an organisation to send its computing and data out to a hyperscale facility and trust the link to hold. Europe's other big data hubs are already saturated and will stay that way well into the 2030s.

Most organisations do not need what they are being sold. The vast data centres going up today exist to train frontier AI. But no building needs a facility built to stream recipe blogs and cat videos by the millisecond simply to manage its own operations. A well-run agentic system handling on site, can do that work and improve day-by-day. Sending information, a thousand miles away to a centre that dwarfs the need creates needless risk.

Power and data currently share a common set of weaknesses. Both are distant, both are constrained, and both leave the organisation leaning on infrastructure it cannot govern. But the answer is the same for each: bring it home.

For power, that means an intelligent, adaptive microgrid – the Hover Agentic Microgrid - generation, storage and management together on-site, producing what the building needs with predictable cost no longer tied to international energy markets. Today Hover combines with solar, with our own roof-mounted vertical-axis turbines, and advanced battery storage. But as new technologies mature, hydrogen fuel cells, spinning mass, compressed air and thermal storage can be folded in, site by site. The system is run by a unique Microgrid Management System, constantly improving performance as the field does, and a city is never tied to a single technology.

For data, it is the same principle, an intelligent control system that keeps a building's data on site, under local management, drawing on outside networks by choice rather than necessity. One integrated system runs both, and everything stays where it can be seen, reached and governed.

Concentration introduces huge risk. Route a nation's power and data through a handful of enormous sites and you create a handful of critical points of failure, each one capable of disrupting a company's global operations or a region's essential services. Distributed generation and on-site data are both the structural answer, and the answer to the wider question of national resilience: power made where it is used, and controlled where the risk sits.

The change is already underway, across places we have already built, and the cities still to come.

Around 80% of the buildings which will be in use in 2050 are already standing today, so the first job is sensitively retrofit what we already have. In London's Royal Docks, Hover Energy has this week received planning permission to install five rooftop turbines at the London Design and Engineering UTC, with further work across the University of East London estate, all of it within the Royal Docks Climate Agreement and its commitment to net zero by 2030.

The second is building future communities with resilient, distributed systems from the start. From global sustainable cities to the UK's raft of mooted New Towns, the logic only gets stronger, and Hover Energy is working with global partners to design generation, storage and control into new developments as part of the fabric. The result is a built environment which powers itself, protected from the start with no outside dependency to fail. 

No one builds a city alone, and it's through partnership that we are seeing results, with IBM, whose Maximo platform runs the live control layer, E.ON on city-scale microgrids, Siemens, and SEE Holdings, designing from the ground up across a new generation of sustainable cities.

Power at a predictable cost, no longer hostage to a distant grid or a volatile market. Capacity freed for others who need it. Bills that are lower and fairer. A net zero that evolves with technology. And a built environment that powers itself, controlled by the people it serves.

A resilient city is a place that can absorb a shock and keep the power on, with all facilities running. That city can be built today. The only question left is whether we have the vision and ambition to build it that way.