The Danish government is preparing plans to sanction datacentres it has blamed for a significant rise in industrial energy demand.
This follows an Audit Office report that damned Denmark’s power grid operator and climate ministry for botching a long-promised expansion of national electricity capacity, so badly that Denmark risks missing its climate targets.
Climate and energy minister Samira Nawa blamed “foreign datacentres”, especially those owned by “American tech giants”, when she trialled an emergency plan in Politiken in June. That was two weeks after she was appointed, following an election in which environmental concerns loomed large and Denmark learned it would miss its target to cut carbon emissions 70% from 1990 levels by 2030.
The Emergency Plan, under public consultation in July, proposed political controls over access to scarce grid capacity. Denmark needed electricity for transport, industry and home heating more than for “power-hungry foreign-owned datacentres”, the governing Social Democrats said. A cross-party agreement backed by 80% of parliament promised to push the datacentres of US tech giants to the back of the queue for scarce grid capacity. “Ordinary” households, hospitals and companies would get priority.
Behind the rhetoric, the draft bill would give lowest priority to any datacentre but those serving worthy societal functions such as health, defence or emergency services. Datacentres supporting Danish business competitiveness might also get priority, the parties agreed in June. Low-ranked projects might redeem themselves by being grid-friendly. The bill left worthiness and friendliness undefined.
The grid queue was the latest turn in a crisis that had been building for years. In 2025, Nawa, then opposition climate spokeswoman, helped lead a no-confidence vote against climate minister Lars Aagaard after revelations that he had withheld statements detailing delays to grid expansion so urgent that it formed part of a “crisis” plan that Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen wrote into her last coalition agreement in 2022.
He survived by one vote. After a snap election in February, Frederiksen won a third term in government with a fragile coalition that promised its emergency measures to fix the problems her last crisis plan failed to solve.
Expansion delayed
State-owned grid operator Energinet’s grid expansion was now so far behind schedule it would delay the green transition so important to Denmark it is part of the national political identity, it emerged in a National Audit Office report two weeks after the election.
The Climate Ministry had known the situation was critical for three years, but acted slowly. Some 70% of projects were delayed, typically by two years. Energy bills would rise and solar farms would be unable to connect to the grid. Energinet would need to double its construction rate for Denmark to meet its 2050 climate target.
Before that report appeared, Energinet had declared a crisis of its own. On 2 March, during the election campaign, it suspended new capacity awards for three months; applications for grid connections “pouring in”. Those from large projects such as datacentres had reached a scale and pace it “could not have foreseen”.
Energinet received 16 applications for grid connections in 2020, it told Computer Weekly. It got 124 in 2025. Denmark’s peak grid load is just over 7GW. Applications total 60GW. Almost half are from battery parks, about a third from datacentres and more than a tenth from power-to-x plants. Some individual requests exceed the consumption of Denmark’s largest cities, but Energinet publishes queue data selectively and would not release historic totals.
Scarce capacity itself encouraged more applications, said Jacob Rosenberg Nielsen, Energinet manager of strategic development. “The capacity is so low that there’s more gain in getting places in the queue.”
Energinet also believes datacentre developers and land speculators reserve capacity at multiple locations, then abandon all but the most favourable. Cancellations doubled between 2023 and 2025 to a tenth of those in the queue.
“There’s been a dramatic increase in cancellations this year from projects which we have already been building [grid] infrastructure to,” said Nielsen. “That causes problems for us because we have a lot of projects in our queue and capacity is low in Denmark. It prevents other projects getting the power they need.”
Planning maturity
Energinet had already adopted measures to solve the queue problem in February. It abandoned its first-come, first-served queue system to prioritise projects that could demonstrate planning maturity and grid-friendliness, such as being located where electricity production was abundant and existing grid infrastructure had capacity to supply it.
Its March pause preceded yet stricter criteria favouring projects with planning permits and funding secured, located near renewable generation, and willing to limit demand in peak periods. European Commission guidance had recommended stricter terms to manage what was in fact a European Union-wide problem.
It was even now preserving capacity for ordinary, expected growth in demand for grid capacity, after a legal clarification by the Danish Energy Agency. Nielsen said Energinet had gone as far as it believed existing law allowed. But then in May, it announced stricter maturity criteria still.
“We were told by the ministry that, ‘You can turn it up a notch. It’s not illegal if you turn it up a notch,’” said Nielsen.
But the Utilities Regulator opened an investigation into their legality. And still it wasn’t enough to unblock the queue, said Nielsen. Energinet needed to do what the law undoubtedly forbade: discriminate between projects of different types such as datacentres and hospitals.
“We need the political decision,” he said. “We need other measures because demand is so much higher than supply right now.”
The coalition formed on 2 June supplied that decision. Its founding agreement promised emergency grid measures alongside long-promised expansion and more renewable generation to power artificial intelligence. Besides political prioritisation, the Emergency Plan bill mostly clarified measures Energinet had already taken.
Though Nawa said datacentres owned by US tech giants were not welcome in Denmark when she publicised the plan, the country’s existing datacentre capacity is provided by them almost entirely, according to European Data Centre Association data.
Denmark’s datacentre capacity is expected to grow so slowly that its data infrastructure will become the smallest of all Nordic countries but Iceland. The coalition promised “massive investment” in public-sector artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure to support Danish industry.
The Energy Agency cut its forecast for datacentre electricity consumption substantially in December, after adopting more realistic assumptions about phased construction, utilisation and queue cancellations. Datacentre consumption was 70% lower than it expected last year, and it would be about 60% lower still in five years. Two-thirds of projects in the queue would never be realised.
Though datacentres account for 15-20GW in the connection queue, installed capacity is forecast to be 1.2GW in 2030, according to Danish Data Centre Association (DDCA) analysis of AF25.
“The government needs to clean up the queue system, remove the inflated sense of demand, and weed out weak projects,” DDCA strategy chief Merima Dzanic told Computer Weekly.
“Criteria should be sharpened across all sectors, not just datacentres, while waiting for the grid to be built out,” she said.
Denmark’s problem was not datacentres but growing demand from all of society for electricity supplied over a limited grid infrastructure.
On 3 June, while Danish politicians prepared their policy to curb datacentres, the EUDCA and 13 associations representing electricity-grid operators and suppliers joined a European Commission plan to make datacentres an integral part of the energy grid. The plan, which the EUDCA has been pushing for some years, would make datacentre demand flexible, adaptable, predictable and beneficial to the grid.
