Spain has handed data centres about 12 GW of grid access. Its own 2030 plan asked for four
A draft royal decree would force data centres to cover 80% of every hour's electricity with newly built renewables. The industry puts nine billion euros at risk and names Portugal as the alternative. The reason for the clampdown is in the decree's own preamble.
The short version doing the rounds this week is easy enough: Spain tightened the rules on data centres, and the industry is threatening to move to Portugal. The long version is sitting in the document nobody opened, and it is considerably more interesting.
Spain’s ecological transition ministry has put out for public hearing a draft royal decree setting energy, environmental and digital sovereignty requirements on any installation above 1 MW. The consultation closed on 10 September. Its centrepiece is an hourly correlation rule: at least 80% of the electricity a data centre draws in any given hour has to be matched by renewable generation produced in that same hour. On top of that comes an additionality test. Only renewable plants commissioned no more than 18 months before the data centre starts up will count, which in practice rules out almost all the capacity already standing in the country.
The figure that explains the hurry
The decree’s preamble says why. Since Royal Decree-Law 8/2023, Spain’s transmission operator has granted data centres over 6 GW of grid access, and the distribution networks have handed out roughly another 6 GW since 2020. Call it 12 GW already committed.
Spain’s 2024 Artificial Intelligence Strategy projected 2.5 GW of computing capacity by 2030, equivalent to between 3.5 and 4 GW of electricity demand. So the access permits already issued are worth close to three times what the country’s own plan expected by the end of the decade, and the ministry writes plainly that honouring all of them would swallow much of the investment budgeted in the 2025-2030 grid plan just to reinforce connections for these sites. This is not an ideological brake. It is a queue that burst.
Where Portugal comes in
The Spanish industry association puts around nine billion euros of planned or in-progress investment at risk, and talks about knock-on effects reaching sixty billion. Portugal shows up on the alternatives list for the familiar reasons: cheap renewable electricity, good telecoms links, the geography, and a lighter regulatory frame.
Lighter is the word to sit with. Portuguese grid capacity is finite too, and plenty of people are competing for it at once, as the regulator showed when it approved €1.6 billion for the distribution network and again when the 1,050 MVA storage auction was put back for lack of conditions. Picking up projects Spain turned away is an opportunity. Picking them up without first deciding how much grid you are willing to give them is exactly how Madrid ended up here. The draft text and the full hearing file are on the Spanish ministry’s portal.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Zarateman / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
