Summary
- The 10-year corporate PPA is expected to supply 55GWh of solar electricity a year from January 2027.
- Together with an earlier Drax-backed agreement, the deal is expected to cover around 70% of Global Switch’s UK electricity use.
- Long-term procurement is becoming a core tool for managing power price exposure, carbon reporting, and customer expectations.
Global Switch has signed a second long-term corporate power purchase agreement with Drax Energy Solutions, adding another contracted renewable electricity route for its UK data centre operations.
The 10-year agreement is expected to provide 55GWh of solar electricity a year from January 2027. Drax will act as the intermediary between Global Switch and an undisclosed renewable generator, using its sleeving service to manage the supply, transfer, and administration of the power within the customer’s electricity arrangements.
The new agreement is expected to cover about 30% of Global Switch’s UK electricity demand. It follows a 2025 corporate PPA between the two companies for 70GWh a year, which was expected to cover 35% of the operator’s UK energy needs. Together, the two deals are expected to cover around 70% of Global Switch’s UK electricity use.
Global Switch operates three UK data centres on its London Docklands campus: London East, London North, and London South. The site is a substantial part of London’s established digital infrastructure base and has also been linked to large GPU deployments.
Procurement is becoming part of capacity strategy
Corporate PPAs do not remove the underlying power constraint facing the UK data centre market. A renewable supply agreement can support price certainty and carbon accounting, but it does not create new local grid capacity or shorten the process of connecting additional load.
Even with that limitation, long-term procurement can be commercially important. It reduces exposure to wholesale price volatility, gives large energy users a clearer cost profile, and supports customers that need evidence behind renewable electricity claims. In a market where data centre energy consumption is becoming more visible to policymakers and enterprise buyers, procurement structure now sits close to commercial positioning.
The Drax model also shows why sleeving has become a useful tool for large consumers. It allows a customer to contract for power from an independent renewable generator while a licensed supplier handles market settlement, balancing, grid administration, and integration with the customer’s supply contract. For data centres, that avoids treating renewable procurement as a separate certificate exercise detached from operational supply.
London’s data centre market remains attractive because of connectivity, customer proximity, cloud presence, financial services workloads, and a deep operator ecosystem. Yet the next phase of growth is being shaped by the power path: transmission capacity, distribution reinforcement, substation availability, and the ability to bring additional load online within a commercially useful timetable.
AI demand raises the pressure further. Higher rack densities and larger contiguous power blocks make electricity procurement more strategic and grid delivery more difficult. Operators with existing campuses can still improve their energy positions through PPAs, but expansion depends on physical capacity as much as contractual supply.
Global Switch’s second Drax-backed agreement shows a large operator tightening its UK energy portfolio before the next wave of demand lands. The harder sector-wide test is how many operators can pair long-term renewable procurement with the grid capacity required to keep expanding.
