Summary
- EDP forecasts Portuguese electricity demand will grow by around 4.5% annually between 2026 and 2035.
- Data centres are expected to contribute approximately 60% of the increase, with more than 2.6GW under development.
- Grid reinforcement, phased energisation, renewable procurement, cooling, and credible customer demand will determine how much of the pipeline is built.
EDP expects data centres to account for approximately 60% of Portugal’s electricity-demand growth over the next decade, placing digital infrastructure at the centre of the country’s power-system investment plans.
The utility forecasts that national demand will grow at a compound annual rate of roughly 4.5% between 2026 and 2035. More than 2.6GW of proposed data centre capacity is in development, led by the planned 1.2GW SINES Data Campus on the Atlantic coast.
Portugal’s electricity consumption has grown relatively slowly over recent years, so the addition of several industrial-scale computing projects would change the profile of the market. Much of the projected increase is concentrated in developments whose connection dates, construction phases, and customer commitments will determine whether the demand arrives on schedule.
Sines joins power and compute
Start Campus and EDP signed a cooperation agreement in February covering renewable-energy development, supply, and infrastructure coordination. The arrangement is initially anchored at Sines, with EDP intended to act as the campus’s preferred long-term partner for green-energy solutions.
The coastal industrial area offers large parcels of land, existing energy infrastructure, international subsea connectivity, and access to the port. Those advantages support the development case, although they do not remove the need for transmission reinforcement, dedicated substations, diverse fibre, cooling plant, and standby power.
A campus with an ultimate demand measured in gigawatts cannot be connected as a single conventional commercial load. Each phase needs an agreed energisation date, a defined network route, and enough firm capacity to support customer installation and commissioning. Construction, transformer orders, switchgear procurement, and the grid programme must progress in step.
Renewable generation strengthens Portugal’s commercial offer to hyperscale customers, particularly where operators have corporate carbon targets. Wind and solar output remains variable, while a data centre continues to draw power at night, during low-wind periods, and through seasonal changes. Supply contracts therefore sit alongside balancing, firm generation, storage, and network services rather than replacing them.
EDP can participate across several parts of the programme, including renewable development, electricity sales, flexibility, and grid investment. Its view of the pipeline will also influence how quickly network spending proceeds, since reinforcement must be justified against the probability and sequence of the connected demand.
The development queue needs discipline
The 2.6GW pipeline includes projects at different stages, and capacity described as “under development” is not equivalent to commissioned load. Some schemes may have land and grid applications but no tenant, while others may be permitted and financed but still dependent on long-lead equipment or network work.
Network planning becomes difficult when speculative requests sit beside construction-ready projects. Building too early for demand that fails to materialise shifts costs into the wider system, while delaying credible connections can leave completed buildings waiting for power. Milestones covering land, financing, planning, procurement, and customer commitments can help distinguish between the two.
Sines will also place pressure on the construction and critical-equipment supply chain. Transformers, switchgear, generators, busway, cooling distribution, controls, pumps, and structural systems will be needed across several buildings, and parallel European programmes are competing for many of the same components and specialist teams.
Cooling design will affect both electricity and water demand. Coastal conditions create options for heat rejection, yet salt, humidity, corrosion, marine interfaces, and environmental permitting introduce additional engineering requirements. Closed-loop systems may limit water use but consume more fan power during hotter periods, while evaporative cooling brings abstraction and treatment questions.
Heat reuse is likely to be more difficult than in dense urban markets because large, year-round heat customers need to be located within an economic transmission distance. Industrial use may offer an outlet, but temperature, demand profile, network cost, and contractual responsibility all need to align.
Subsea cables and Portugal’s position on Europe’s Atlantic edge support international connectivity, although campus resilience requires diverse terrestrial routes as well as landing-station access. A concentration of demand around one coastal location increases the need to avoid common routes, shared ducts, and single points of failure.
Should the largest projects proceed broadly as planned, data centres will become a structural component of Portuguese energy demand, influencing generation, network reinforcement, industrial land, and regional construction capacity. Slower customer commitments or delayed grid work would spread that growth across a longer period, leaving the market below the headline pipeline while still substantially larger than it is today.
