It's a well-established fact that Europe's Nordic nations are home to some of the world's highest ratios of renewable energy production, ample grid connectivity, and cool climates. All those features make them a perfect home for massive data centers— perhaps too perfect. After a sudden inrush of a total of 60 GW of grid connection requests, 14 GW of those for datacenters, Denmark's Energinet was forced to issue a moratorium on new large-scale installations, according to a CNBC report.
For reference, Denmark's current power peak power consumption is estimated around 7 GW, so it's easy enough to understand why the action was necessary. The pause is meant to last three months, though there's speculation that that period might be extended given the need to reprioritize many of the requests.
During this time, Energinet is reportedly meant to conduct an overview and decide on measures to implement to increase capacity. A part of that procedures should involve reprioritizing requests, and possibly even reviewing the regulatory framework, emulating the situations of the Netherlands and Ireland, both countries forced to rethink how to approach the situation.
There are a few points worth noting, though. First off, the top-line 60 GW figure is not a steady-state power generation requirement, but a need for total grid connectivity. Second, said connection requests seem to be highly inflated and represent pie-in-the-sky scenarios, as the Danish Data Center Industry (DDCI) estimates the total installed power capacity for computing at 1.2 GW in 2030, or less than 10% of what is currently being asked for.
Perhaps equally relevant, the remaining 44 GW worth of connection requests are for non-datacenter applications. Given the country's track record on big investments in renewable energy, it's not hard to imagine that a significant chunk of that capacity would be used by large-scale battery installations and power-to-X facilities.
Altogether, it's quite the competition for scarce resources of a grid that was strained years ago already, very much a common story in any country with a high level of renewable energy production. Adding fuel to the fire, the rise of oil prices due to the Iran war have sparked a renewed interest in electrical vehicles across Europe, reigniting concerns about the grid operating at capacity.
DDCI CEO Henrik Hansen told CNBC that the connection request queue reflects a "fantasy", and that "the gap between what's available and what's requested is growing", while seemingly asking for better criteria to determine the priority for connections. The same article quotes Sebastian Bøtcher from Schneider Electric describing the situation as "energy policy 'hunger games' between data centers and Danish businesses".
It's not hard to imagine Denmark and many other countries following in the footsteps of Ireland, whose 2025 framework demands new datacenters over 10 MW to have their own power generation, be capable of feeding excess power back to the grid, and produce 80% of their annual demand from renewable sources.
All told, Denmark joins the Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, Germany's Frankfurt district, and the USA's Maine, New York, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Maryland, and Virginia in attempting to contain the consequences of unfettered AI datacenter buildouts. In the meantime, Digital Realty's Pernille Hoffmann puts it plainly, stating that whether for Denmark or the Nordic region, should the grid capacity requirements not be met, AI players will be forced to "move [their workloads] somewhere else."
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