Spain’s government has sent a softened version of its draft royal decree on data centres to the Council of State, raising the size at which most of its energy and environmental obligations apply from 1MW to 10MW of access power. The revision, made public on 26 October, keeps the core renewable-supply requirements but gives operators more time and more ways to meet them.

What has changed

The first draft, put out for public consultation on 27 August, would have applied to facilities above 1MW. According to Spanish trade press, the energy ministry (MITECO) reviewed more than 600 submissions and a report from the competition and energy regulator CNMC before redrafting the text.

The headline obligations survive. Large data centres must still cover 80% of their consumption with additional renewable generation and match 80% of it hour by hour. What has loosened is the detail around those targets:

• Older plants count: linked renewable capacity may now be up to 36 months older than the data centre’s start of operation, up from 18 months. Solar PV without an existing power purchase agreement qualifies regardless of when it was built.
• Shorter contracts: the minimum renewable PPA term falls from ten years to six.
• Batteries allowed: storage, including hybrid solar-plus-battery systems, can be used for hourly matching.
• Efficiency: the provisional maximum PUE rises from 1.15 to 1.25, with a methodology to adjust for climate zone. The water usage effectiveness limit stays at 0.1.

A five-year glide path, at a price

Operators that cannot meet the additionality target straight away can opt for a transition of up to five years with stepped hourly-matching targets. In return, they must join Spain’s automatic power-reduction scheme, which allows the system operator Red Eléctrica to curtail or disconnect them during grid stress without compensation, according to news agency EFE.

Projects that sign grid access contracts before 2029 get six months from signing to prove additionality. Applications already in progress have three months. Data centres that form part of EU initiatives such as the planned European AI gigafactories get a separate regime, including a 60-month window to secure renewable supply.

Digital sovereignty rules have been narrowed but apply regardless of size. Systems classed as high-security under Spain’s National Security Scheme must keep content data and backups within the EU or EEA, with maintenance from outside the bloc allowed only when technically essential.

Context

Reuters described the new text as a more flexible version of the decree, coming after a wave of project announcements that have made Spain one of Europe’s busiest markets for AI infrastructure. Cheap renewable power and available land, particularly in Aragón and Extremadura, have drawn multi-hundred-megawatt campus proposals. The Council of State must now give its opinion before the government can adopt the decree; no adoption date has been given.

Why it matters for modular and edge in Europe

The tenfold rise in the threshold is the change that matters most for smaller deployments. Most edge sites, micro data centres and containerised modules run well below 10MW, so under the revised draft they would largely fall outside the hourly-matching, additionality and PUE regime that would have applied above 1MW. Some obligations still reach them: communication and reporting duties continue to apply from 500kW of IT power, sovereignty rules apply at any size, and capacity owned by the same company on the same site is aggregated, which limits the scope for splitting a campus into sub-10MW blocks.

For larger modular builds, the acceptance of batteries and the five-year transition give developers more room to phase capacity in alongside on-site solar and storage. That fits the incremental build-out model many prefabricated suppliers promote, though the price of the transition, accepting curtailment without compensation, will need to be weighed against uptime commitments to customers.

Sources

• EFE via Infobae: El decreto de centros de datos mantiene elementos clave y prioriza factorías IA europeas (26 October 2026)
• El Periódico de la Energía: El Gobierno da un respiro a los centros de datos (26 October 2026)
• Reuters via The Star: Spain relaxes initial proposal for data-center rules (26 October 2026)