In 2008, American bank Morgan Stanley announced £300mn plans for a tidal energy-powered data centre in Scotland’s Pentland Firth. A month after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the news went round the world. The facility was to be off-grid, using energy from tidal turbines and potentially generating enough power for a city the size of Bristol. It was never built.

Perhaps now is the time to dust down those plans. Since 2008 there have been exponential advances in battery technology and energy efficiency. The cost of rolling out multiple off-grid microgrids, in $/MWh, is now lower than a large power station over a 20-year cycle. As another energy crisis looms in the Middle East, and Russia weaponises power stations in Ukraine, the need for energy backup for critical systems has increased exponentially. Yet Western governments, especially in Europe, remain focused on centralised, large-scale solutions.

In the US, off-grid tech has gone from a backwater to one of the fastest-growing energy sectors. It is taking off in mining – solar farms at gold mines in Nevada, for example. And Crusoe Energy Systems in Denver deploys modular data centres to manage mining operations at oil well sites, powered by converting flared natural gas into electricity.

Agriculture is not far behind. Entenmann’s – the vertically integrated farming-to-retail behemoth, a subsidiary of the Mexican conglomerate Grupo Bimbo – has taken at least one of its US farms off grid. In sectors like disaster relief, tourism and remote working, off-grid solutions are here to stay.

Some of the energy technology was featured in New Energy World last year. It is possible that the developed world has much to learn from successful installations across the under-developed world.

The cost of rolling out multiple off-grid microgrids, in $/MWh, is now lower than a large power station over a 20-year cycle.

The energy piece can be integrated with other technologies. We can learn from the developing world how to combine energy management with off-grid water management, sewage, shelter, storage, air conditioning and refrigeration. Agriculture in developing countries is using off-grid refrigeration to allow farmers a longer shelf life for their produce.

Off-grid success stories have taken a long time. Also in 2008, the Fort Hunter Liggett Army Base in California began its journey towards energy self-sufficiency, which was finally achieved 14 years later, with a $21mn microgrid going live last month. The current system includes a 3.75 MW solar array combined with a 2.5 MW/5 MWh battery storage unit. The Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) monitors and controls the microgrid’s operations in real-time, managing energy generation, distribution and storage.

Today there are many more off-grid military bases in the US, including Fort Hood and Fort Bliss, both in Texas, and a Marine Corps base in San Diego, California. In the UK – not so much.

Why has Europe been slow to go off-grid? 
Why has off-grid energy not been more popular in Europe? How come its many benefits often seem to evaporate when implemented in practice? One reason is that the European Union has always prioritised rolling out the grid to its member states, ever since the initial European Coal and Steel Community’s (ECSC) institutional framework, which influenced the future governance structures of the EU. This helps to explain why our thinking is so firmly rooted to the grid even though other delivery mechanisms are now more cost-effective.

Some large UK companies have taken power into their own hands. Notably Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which is implementing several renewable energy initiatives aimed at generating at least 25% of its energy needs, over 120 MW of renewable energy, which include solar installations at manufacturing sites in Gaydon, Halewood and Wolverhampton. Meanwhile, soft drinks producer Britvic completed a 28 MW solar farm in 2023 to provide approximately 75% of the energy for its UK factories under a 10-year power purchase agreement.

These are the early adopters; it remains to be seen how quickly others will follow.

Perhaps the real explanation for the slow spread of off-grid energy is that many of the failed projects were too big. It is best deployed in smaller, modular units of up to approximately 100 MW.

The newest incarnation of off-grid thinking into mainstream business models is ‘edge computing’, of which Crusoe Energy Systems (above) is an example. This growing trend involves deploying small, modular data centres closer to the source of data generation, often in rural areas. These ‘edge’ data centres use clean energy and battery storage systems, providing essential computing capabilities while maintaining low latency.

As the demand for clean electricity increases over the next five years, and new technologies are introduced at pace across existing grid systems, the chances of price spikes or outages remains high. With a typical large-scale wind farm taking at least three years to approve and build, is now the time to be thinking of backup plans to get us through the next winters? Especially for domestic consumers, who cannot respond to price increases in the same way as commercial users, off-grid electricity can provide resilience and a degree of local control.

It is possible to imagine tens of thousands of 5 MW clean energy off-grid installations, supplementing energy from larger solar or wind farms. These may draw from several energy sources, including solar and geothermal. Some will eventually connect to the grid, some to other nearby microgrids, and some not at all.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author only and are not necessarily given or endorsed by or on behalf of the Energy Institute.

• Further reading: ‘Project Tiošpáye: on- and off-grid solar for Indigenous community development’. Sarah Townes, CFO and Zero Emissions Network Director of the American Solar Energy Society, introduces a unique project to support innovative housing for the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe in South Dakota.
• Affordable, reliable and clean energy is essential to sustainable human development. Ensuring everyone has energy access by 2030 is the seventh United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 7). However, some 685 million people had no electricity and 2.1 billion had no clean cooking fuel in 2022. Connecting this considerable demographic to renewable energy that won’t harm their health or the environment is a major challenge.