On the 25th, some Spanish media outlets, including El Mundo and El Economista, reported that Teresa Ribera’s Ministry was working on a regulation aimed at “preventing speculative hoarding” through the “state control of the deployment of data centers and other investments that involve high energy consumption,” all via a system of access contests. This would allow the Government, according to these sources, to “control electricity demand and redirect the location of projects developed in the country to where energy availability is ensured.”
Indeed, Royal Decree-Law 8/2023, in its article 20 bis, provides for the first time the holding of contests for granting demand access capacity at any node of the transport network with a voltage equal to or greater than 220 kV.
It adds that the criteria, conditions for participation, and the details of the procedure for these contests will be regulated by an order from the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge.
While the Miteco, in discussions with the Foro Industria y Energía (FIE), denies the existence of a specific regulation for demand access contests for data centers, the RDL8/23 indicates that the criteria to be used for granting capacity must be defined in that order, but will at least include temporary criteria related to the start date of the demand installation’s consumption, commitments to flexibility in consumption and demand management, improvements in energy efficiency, socio-economic, environmental, and territorial impact, productive linkages, technical and economic solvency of the project and the promoters, criteria related to the volume of investment, and criteria related to the greenhouse gas emissions avoided by the project for which demand access capacity is requested.
What seems evident to us at Foro Industria y Energía is that such restrictive regulation would consolidate a strategy for managing energy from the supply side rather than from the demand side. That is, prioritizing the philosophy of “we generate as much energy as we consume” over “we need as much energy as we generate.”
It is clear that rules must be established to manage energy demand in industry and, specifically, the demand from data centers. The industry itself is the first to be interested in clear regulation that avoids uncertainty. However, what seems illogical is to broadly proclaim that Spain’s position as an energy generator is an asset for attracting industry while simultaneously extraordinarily limiting the volume of energy that these potential industries can access, either directly or, more importantly, through the transport networks. Without the development of these networks, these industries will simply choose to locate elsewhere.