Data center companies, engaged in one of the key business activities within the new connected society, were slammed by the government when they asked to be deemed electro-intensive.

The team of the Minister of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge,

Teresa Ribera

, denied that request to the main

data center

groups

established in Spain, according to industry sources consulted by EL MUNDO.

Those

data centers

are deprived of the privileges of those who do enjoy groups metallurgy, chemical, steel or ceramic, a rejection which occurred in February, before the escalation of prices

the coming electricity threatening

all these businesses. Data centers (or data processing centers) store and transmit information thanks to hundreds of thousands of servers, so they incur enormous energy costs, both to power IT equipment and to keep it at a very low temperature.

The Secretary of State for Energy met in February with the main players in the sector, through a videoconference through Teams. The Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructures, dependent on the

Economic Vice Presidency of Nadia Calviño

, was also present, but in an intermediary role, as a link so that the demands of these new technology companies were attended by the Ecological Vice Presidency of Ribera.

However, on this occasion,

the green and digital policy

that supposedly backbones the goals of the Pedro Sánchez Executive were not aligned. According to sources present at the meetings, the Directorate of Energy Policy, with Manuel García at the helm, gave as an answer the recommendation that the

data centers

take their request to Brussels, since the Government of Spain would not intervene in this matter. Asked in this regard by EL MUNDO, sources from the Ministry of Ecological Transition point out that the last word is that of Industry, Commerce and Tourism. "Compensation aid for electrointensives are state aid and as such must be based on any of the European regulatory guidelines," they argue from the department he heads.

Reyes Maroto

, from where he refers to the business activities included in Royal Decree 1106/2020: "The sectors must be productive sectors, subject to a relevant exposure of international trade, with the risk of carbon leakage."

New association to lobby

Faced with reality strikes like this one, data companies have launched the creation of an association that represents them and channels their

lobbying

efforts

, as this newspaper has learned from sources in that sector.

The grouping is expected to be made public in the next few days.

It should be remembered that this month Sánchez himself encouraged "to place Spain at the same level as European leaders in data center infrastructures and turn it into the

digital node of southern Europe

."

It will have to be done, however, without the help that the electro-intensive industries of this country do get.

This select group, to which the data centers have not been able to join, achieves

compensation of up to 85%

in different charges regulated in the electricity tariff, such as the remuneration received by the oldest renewable installations. Leather-making or juice-making companies, in addition to, of course, foundries and paper or cement factories, do enjoy this favorable treatment as a result of their high dependence on electricity. Many companies in these sectors contract their electricity in the long term and through the free market, which has been increasing its prices to record figures; However, this escalation conditions the rates offered in the future by large electricity companies, even though they are part of the free market. Precisely,Iberdrola and Endesa have announced in recent days that they are going to pass on to their large customers the hack approved by the Government on the income from their nuclear and hydroelectric plants.

The price of electricity reached

182.71 euros / megawatt hour (MWh) today

, the second most expensive in history, with the consequent impact on the prices that the industry applies to the products it manufactures. This Monday it was known that the annual rate of the Industrial Price Index (IPRI) was in August the highest since 1980.

Data centers are not dedicated to manufacturing but to provide connectivity services in an increasingly digitized society in need of distributing large volumes of information, practically in real time, as has been demonstrated during confinement by the pandemic: they contribute to this trend is the emergence of

cloud computing

and the regular use of social networks such as

Facebook

, platforms such as

YouTube

or

streamers such

as

Netflix

; that is, services that depend on data centers to reach consumers without delay.

In Spain, some of the companies that have expanded their data centers are Data4, Equinix, Interxion, NTT and Global Switch.

In addition,

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

, the thriving branch of cloud computing within the e-commerce giant, has built its own infrastructures in Aragon, a project that the company presented to the President of the Government at the 2019 edition of the Davos Forum .

This same month, IBM has announced that it will also be installed in Spain, specifically in the Community of Madrid, an announcement framed in a ceremony attended by the president.

Sánchez then assured that Spain "is generating sufficient incentives and the right climate to invest in digitization."

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