Data centres: five years of leeway in exchange for disconnecting first, unpaid

The headline was that the Spanish government is easing off: the data centre decree raises its general threshold from 1 to 10 megawatts, which leaves most rooms in the country outside its scope. That is true. What did not fit in the headline was the price of the other half of the relief. The revised text sent to the Council of State grants a five-year ramp to reach 80% renewables hour by hour, and in exchange it asks whoever takes that ramp to enrol in the Automatic Power Reduction Scheme: the grid operator may cut their supply whenever the system needs it, pay them nothing for it, and cut them before any other class of consumer. If your servers live rented in somebody else's room, that paragraph affects you even though your name appears nowhere in the decree.

Where the rule stands today, exactly

It is called the draft royal decree regulating the energy, environmental, resilience and digital sovereignty requirements applicable to data centres, and it develops the first additional provision of Royal Decree-Law 7/2026 of 20 March. Spain's Ministry for the Ecological Transition put it out for public hearing from 27 August to 10 September 2026 — the deadline was 4 September and was extended by a week. That version is the one you can read in full, straight from the ministry.

The second, revised version was sent to the Council of State on 26 October 2026, flagged as urgent. That one is not public: what is known about it comes from the reporting of those days and from the legal analyses that have read it. The stated goal is approval by the Council of Ministers before 29 November, the date of the general election, and the rule would take effect twenty days after publication in the official gazette. We say it up front because it conditions everything that follows: as of today this is a draft.

What moved in eight weeks

Between the August version and the October one, almost every number an infrastructure manager would use to decide anything changed:

• General threshold: from 1 MW of access power to 10 MW.
• Transitional PUE: from 1.15 to 1.25, for facilities with an access contract signed before 1 January 2029 and until 31 December 2031.
• Renewable additionality window: from 18 to 36 months.
• Minimum PPA term: from 10 to 6 years, and battery storage is now accepted as backing.
• What did not move: the 80% hourly-matched renewable target, the WUE at the top level of the European water efficiency label, and the reporting duty from 500 kW of IT power, which stayed where it was.

There is an irony there: we wrote in August that the decree would be decided by PUE, and PUE is precisely one of the four numbers that moved. That list is why none of the six questions this post ends with depends on any of those figures. Four of the five parameters that matter changed in eight weeks, and the Council of State's opinion is still pending. What does hold is the shape of the deal, and that is the interesting part.

The toll on the ramp

80% renewables hour by hour, from day one, is very hard to meet. So the revised text opens a door: a five-year transitional regime, with a ramp starting at 60% during peak hours (P1) until 31 December 2028, rising to 70% in P1 between 2029 and 2031 — with a minimum in mid-peak hours (P2) too — and landing at 80% with hourly matching from 2031. The exact P2 figure is, in fact, the only data point in this whole article where the sources that published it do not agree with each other, so we leave it without a number.

The door has a toll. Centres opting for that gradual transition must enable themselves to take part, unpaid, in the Automatic Power Reduction Scheme — SRAP — run by the grid operator. In plain terms: the system operator may interrupt their supply whenever the grid needs it. And there is a second edge: the heavy electro-intensive industry taking part in that same mechanism does get paid for it. Data centres would not, and on top of that, according to what has been reported about the text, they would be the first category of installation to be disconnected.

This is not sustainability: it is a parameter of your RTO

We have been repeating the same sentence for a while: failure is inevitable, downtime is a design decision. A cut scheduled by the system operator is, if you think about it, the most benign failure there is — the only one you get warned about — and precisely for that reason it is the one that best measures a room's real quality. When you stop counting outages per year and start counting them per month, four numbers almost nobody looks at move to the front row:

• Hours of diesel autonomy at real load. Not catalogue load, and measured with a date on it. A tank sized for "one blackout a year" is not the same tank as one sized for a mechanism that may fire several times in a tight winter.
• The fuel resupply contract. With a committed lead time, and a written answer to the awkward question: what happens to your tanker when the outage is not only yours.
• Genset redundancy and the last load test. Not the certificate saying they start: how long the test ran and at what share of load.
• UPS recharge time. This is where most people get it wrong, because the figure everyone knows is the discharge one. We already wrote about how long a UPS takes to be full again, and in short: what really limits how many consecutive outages you survive is not how long the battery lasts, it is how long it takes to be full again.

The 10 MW threshold does not protect you: it leaves you off the list

Here is a consequence that runs exactly counter to instinct. A 2 or 3 MW room falls below the threshold — the change leaves out projects of that size that the August draft did cover — does not enter the transitional regime and therefore does not enrol in SRAP. A room of hundreds of megawatts is inside and, if it takes the ramp, accepts the toll. For a few years, "my provider is huge" stops automatically meaning "my provider is more available" on this specific point. We are not saying big is worse: we are saying that this time size cuts in an unexpected direction, and that the right question is not how much power your provider has but which regime it has chosen to sit under. And it needs bounding properly: that holds for this decree. SRAP is not born with it and has other doors — the CNMC flexible access permits require, in their type 3, being enabled in SRAP for the whole life of the permit, and in type 2 impose power limitation instructions from the distributor — so a small room can end up inside through another file. What we are saying is that this decree does not open that door for it.

What does reach everyone, threshold or not, is the grid queue. The ministry itself puts the numbers in the project memorandum: more than 6 GW of access granted on the transmission network since December 2023 and another 6 GW on distribution since 2020, against the 2.5 GW of computing power the 2024 Artificial Intelligence Strategy projects for 2030, which the ministry itself translates into 3.5 to 4 GW of electrical demand. That gap between what has been requested and what is expected to be used is the real reason for the decree — we already counted how many of those megawatts are in service —, and it is also what ends up moving the price of a contracted kilowatt in a room. In case another reminder were needed that colocation is no longer negotiated in U but in kW.

The part that applies to you even at 30 kW

The 10 MW threshold is the one for sustainability requirements. The digital sovereignty ones carry no threshold: they apply regardless of power. The focus is on centres hosting the public sector's most sensitive information — systems rated HIGH under Spain's National Security Framework (ENS) — whose data must be processed, stored and transferred within the European Union, with remote technical support from third countries allowed only where strictly necessary and with traceability of those accesses. Serious, repeated breaches are paid for with the only thing that really hurts in this business: loss of the grid access and connection permits.

If you sell software to public administrations, that is your sentence of the day. Where the rack lives becomes a contractual clause again rather than an engineering detail, and "it is in the cloud" stops being an answer.

The six questions we would ask today

None of this requires waiting for the official gazette. These are questions you can email today to whoever houses your hardware, and every one of them is answered with a yes, a no or a number:

1. Are you above or below the threshold, and do you intend to take the transitional regime and, with it, SRAP?
2. How many hours of diesel autonomy do you have at real load, and on what date was it measured?
3. Is there a fuel resupply contract with a committed lead time? What priority do you hold if the outage is general?
4. How many gensets are there, with what redundancy, and how long did the last real-load test run?
5. Does a disconnection ordered by the system operator count as unavailability under the SLA, or is it excluded by the force majeure or acts-of-authority clause?
6. Is PUE a contractual commitment, and how is it passed through if the applicable regime changes?

The fifth is the one that interests us most and the one almost nobody checks. It is perfectly possible for your SLA to promise four nines while expressly excluding anything ordered by an authority. If the mechanism fires on three January afternoons, those four nines remain intact on paper and your application has spent three afternoons riding a diesel engine. Both things are true at once, which is exactly why you want to read it beforehand rather than afterwards.

The line we still cannot read

Time to say it plainly. We have not read the text now at the Council of State, because it is not public; we have read the August hearing draft in full, which is, and for the October version we rely on what has been reported and on the legal analyses that have handled it. The opinion may change it again. The electoral calendar may leave it unapproved. And the history of this text — four parameters moved in eight weeks — argues against building any investment decision on its figures yet. What you can do today, without waiting for anything, are the six questions above: not one of them depends on the decree reaching the gazette.

How we look at it

At everyWAN we keep our own hardware in data centres and spread Proxmox VE with Ceph storage across several rooms precisely so that losing a whole one is maintenance paperwork and not a three-in-the-morning phone call. We are not resellers of any platform and we do not sell licences for anything; what we sell is that the failure is planned for. Our last full-recovery drill was timed at fourteen minutes, and we say that as proof the number can be measured, never as a contractual promise. If this decree ends up turning grid outages into routine, the old question — what happens today if any one piece dies — gets answered with a drill, not with an adjective. That is what our colocation service and our disaster recovery are about.

Sources. Consulted on 6 November 2026. The public hearing dates (27 August to 10 September 2026, after the initial deadline of 4 September was extended), the enabling provision in the first additional provision of Royal Decree-Law 7/2026 of 20 March, the 500 kW IT-power threshold for reporting duties, the August draft's transitional PUE 1.15 and WUE 0.1 values and the granted-access figures (over 6 GW on transmission since December 2023, another 6 GW on distribution since 2020, the 2.5 GW computing projection for 2030 and its stated equivalence of 3.5 to 4 GW of electrical demand) come from the public participation record of Spain's Ministry for the Ecological Transition. The rise of the general threshold from 1 to 10 MW — which Ashurst specifies is measured as access power —, the transitional ramp (60% in P1 until 31 December 2028, 70% in P1 between 2029 and 2031, 80% with hourly matching from 2031) and the duty to enable participation "without remuneration in the Automatic Power Reduction Scheme, SRAP, managed by Red Eléctrica" are in El Periódico de la Ingeniería. That data centres are unpaid for SRAP unlike heavy industry and would be first to be disconnected, and the date of referral to the Council of State (26 October 2026, flagged urgent) with approval targeted before 29 November, come from Roams and ChannelPartner, which adds the permanent loss of grid access permits for serious breaches. The transitional PUE of 1.25 until 31 December 2031 for those signing the ATR contract before 1 January 2029, the 36-month additionality window, the 6-year minimum PPA, the acceptance of storage, entry into force twenty days after publication in the gazette, and that digital sovereignty requirements apply regardless of power with ENS HIGH-category data staying in the EU, come from the analysis "Centros de Datos: ¿Qué ha cambiado en el borrador de Real Decreto?" by Ashurst Perkins Coie. The acceptance of remote technical support from third countries where strictly necessary is reported by Europa Press via Infobae. That the type 3 flexible access permit requires being enabled in the automatic power reduction system for the whole life of the permit comes from the CNMC resolution of 31 July 2026, developing its Circular 1/2024, and predates and is independent of this royal decree. The exact percentage required in mid-peak hours (P2) does not agree across the sources consulted, so we give no figure. The fourteen-minute full-recovery drill is everyWAN internal data: it is a timed test, not a contractual guarantee. The photograph in the social image is "Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant Standby Diesel Generator", by PEO ACWA (Program Executive Office, Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives), CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons, cropped by us.