Finland plans to push large data centres to the back of the grid queue

Finland is preparing a law that would give large data centres lower priority for new electricity connections, potentially delaying projects or causing them to collapse, Yle reports.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment says the change is intended to preserve grid capacity for households and other industries. The ministry’s industrial counsellor, Tatu Pahkala, said officials had concluded that data centres could be treated differently because of their unusually large number and the speed at which they can be developed.

“We thought we could introduce this kind of mild unequal treatment,” Pahkala said. He said the proposal had been carefully considered and drew on models in Denmark and Ireland, where data centres face even lower priority.

Under the proposal, applications for electricity connections would be divided into four priority groups. Households and small businesses would come first, followed by medium-sized industry and smaller data centres. Large data centres and major industrial projects would be in the third group, while electricity storage facilities would come last.

A large data centre or industrial project could move up one group if it had a substantial amount of its own flexible electricity generation. Otherwise, connections for lower-priority applicants would be offered only after the needs of higher-priority users had been met.

At present, Fingrid and regional grid companies make connection agreements in the order applications arrive. Under the new system, only applications in the top group would continue to be handled as they come in. Other applications would be processed twice a year, which could initially mean delays of up to a year.

Fingrid has received a large number of new connection applications, Pahkala said. Demand from data centres has already led to restrictions on connections for other new users, including electricity storage facilities and electric boilers. Fingrid’s grid service shows no available capacity for new connections in southern Finland.

The data centre industry has criticised the plan. Antti Poikola, executive director of the Finnish Data Center Association, said grid capacity needed to be allocated sensibly but questioned why one industry had been singled out. He argued that electricity users should be treated equally regardless of how they use power.

The change could make Finland less attractive to data centre companies, which have favoured the country partly because projects have been able to get up and running quickly. In the United States, obtaining a high-capacity electricity connection takes more than four years on average and over seven years in some areas.