Denmark spent a decade waving in data centres with the promise of green power, cheap by European standards and secure enough for a cloud region. This month, however, it told the next wave to wait.
On October 1 Denmark’s Parliament adopted an emergency plan that throws out first come, first served. Bill L 23 puts every new request into one of four ranks, and an ordinary data centre sits in the last of them, behind homes, hospitals, heat pumps and the shift off fossil fuels. From October 12 that order is due to apply.
The reason is the size of the queue. On March 2 Energinet, the state transmission company, said about 60 gigawatts of new demand was waiting across the transmission and distribution grids, against peak consumption of about 7. It also said not all of that 60 will be built, but it has to plan as if it might, for as long as the applications sit there. Under the new law it can turn a lower-ranked request away if the capacity will not be there.
“The situation in our power grid is deeply serious,” climate minister Samira Nawa said. “Space in the power grid has become a scarce resource.” The ranking will apply the next time large connections are handed out, this autumn.
Where Bill L 23 Puts a Data Centre in the Queue
The four ranks sort a request by what the power is for, not by who filed first. A hospital system can argue for the top. A cloud hall cannot, unless the data centre is tied to defence, health or emergency services.
Category 1 is reserved as the grid companies go. It covers ordinary growth for customers already connected, new households, and those critical services. Category 2 is the shift off fossil fuels, from electric transport and heat to renewables, hydrogen and plants that turn electricity into fuel. Category 3 is storage, including batteries. And finally, there is category 4, which is a data centre whose main purpose is processing and storage and which draws a large, steady load. A factory or other commercial user that is not a data centre does not sit here. It sits in category 2. Data centres sit last because the load is usually not tied to one place and can draw power in a flat, heavy pattern.
Energinet can refuse a category 3 or 4 request if it does not expect enough capacity in the foreseeable future and a connection would crowd out a higher need. Counsel reading the draft orders treat that as a duty to reject, unless planned expansion will cover it in a reasonable time. Flexibility does not lift a data centre into category 1. It can move a project ahead of a rival in the same group, and in that draft reading it can also keep a tight application alive rather than refused.
The four ranks, in the order Energinet applies them, are these: