Investors behind the eight (to date) data centres wth their sights on Portugal will require more electricity to run them than the maximum production available on the national grid.
“If all the requests for connections to the grid converted into new data centres in Portugal, the nation’s energy consumption could triple”, writes Expresso today in an article that shows how complicated Portugal’s embrace of the digital world has become.
REN – the company running the national grid – and the state (which must approve or otherwise REN’s investment plans) “will have an arduous challenge ahead of them: how to distribute new access capacity to the electrical infrastructure in the face of multiple requests”.
According to the paper, environment and energy minister Maria da Graça Carvalho has “no doubts of the path to follow”. “The reinforcement and modernisation of the electrical grid are crucial to accelerate the energetic transition”.
Ms Carvalho has told Expresso that the government “is doing everything to create a favourable environment to capture new projects, authorising the necessary investments, simplifying processes and promoting the storage of energy”.
The paper adds: “In spite of their demanding expensive investments, data centres could bring benefits for general consumers: as they use elevated volumes of energy 24 hours per day, they will absorb a relevant part of the fixed costs of the electricity system, potentially unburdening families of that component in tariffs for grid access”. (This presuming that the grid is able to expand enough to supply electricity to all that require it).
Expresso then goes into the list of data centres in the offing: there is one in Fundão, implying an investment in the municipality of €4 billion, in an infrastructure spread over 80 hectares. Mayor Paulo Fernandes is cited as saying the project would “certainly be the largest ever in the municipality…”
At the same time, there is a data centre planned for Abrantes, with the promise of an investment of €7 billion – and this comes “in parallel with various other plans that have been developed in Portugal, where Start Campus (owned by David Kempner and Pioneer Point Partners) already has an investment underway of €8.5 billion – the largest in the country”.
Just in the next five years, the Portuguese association of Data Centres (APCD), estimates that the country will attract €13 billion in data centre investments – “and this does not include the €4 billion investment forecast in the Portuguese candidacy for the construction of an AI gigafactory, promoted by the Banco Português de Fomento, which, if it happens, will be financed by European funds”.
Portugal “has excellent conditions to turn into a digital hub” with an important position in Europe, Luís Duarte, president of APCD tells Expresso, because other markets, like Germany, the Netherlands and even Spain, “have become saturated”.
Duarte describes a future where the mere housing of data centres in Portugal could “contribute to Portuguese sovereignty” and add as much as €26 billion to the country’s GDP by 2030… All this on the basis that the niggling issue of electricity supply/ capacity can be sorted.
“Without investment in the networks it will be difficult to connect all these requests on time and at costs that make sense”, Pedro Vasconcelos, a director of EDP, admits – thus the impetus now to boost REN’s capacity.
But elsewhere, talk is already centring on whether data centres represent a setback for the energy transition – and there are others who warn that Portugal’s headlong conversion to EU-powered ‘transitions’, will see it sacrificing biodiversity, farmland and rural stability (see text to come).
Source material: Expresso/ Financial Times/ CARE (Committee for Awareness of Responsible Energy)
