Abrantes has cleared a second mega data centre. The two together could draw 19 times the town's power
The council waved through a preliminary application from the Hyperion group at the Alvega roundabout, next to an EDC ONE site already approved at Pego. At full load the pair would use about 2.8 TWh a year against the municipality's 148.8 GWh in 2024.
Abrantes council has given a unanimous favourable opinion to a preliminary application for a second large data centre in the municipality. The developer is the Hyperion group, the site sits beside the Alvega roundabout, and the footprint runs to roughly 151,000 square metres of ground area and 287,000 square metres of built space. It carries Project of National Interest status, which shortens the administrative clock.
It will have company. Since September 2025 a second large site has been approved on land facing the old Pego coal plant, this one from EDC ONE, with 16.2 million euros of tax exemptions attached. Both depend on the same grid connection point at Pego.
That shared connection is where the arithmetic starts to bite. Quercus added up the announced capacity of the two projects, 300 MW at Pego and 20 MW at Alvega, and ran the numbers. On a deliberately conservative assumption, with the halls running at 30 per cent of installed capacity, the pair would consume around 841 GWh a year. The whole of Abrantes used 148.8 GWh of electricity in 2024. Run flat out, the two would reach roughly 2.8 TWh, close to 19 times what the municipality gets through in a year.
Then there is the water
Facilities this size are cooled with water, and the river basin they are heading for has none to spare. The Portuguese Environment Agency’s most recent assessment of the Tagus and Western Streams basin, covering the 2028 to 2033 planning cycle, puts the water exploitation index for the Tagus at 40 per cent. About 60 per cent of the basin’s surface water bodies are still rated below good status.
The environmental group wants an impact assessment carried out before any administrative decision on the Alvega site rather than deferred to the licensing stage. It wants a second, cumulative assessment covering both sites together, on the reasonable grounds that the effects will arrive on the ground added up rather than one at a time. And it wants the environment agency and the Lisbon regional authority to withhold a favourable opinion while conditions remain unresolved.
There is a zoning question underneath all of this. Abrantes has a Technological Free Zone, a regime designed for experimental and temporary uses, and it now covers more than half the municipality.
A national bet, arriving locally
Portugal has decided to compete for this industry and has the instruments in the field. The government’s map of where it wants the next solar and wind farms built landed a week ago, and Sines is already bidding for one of Europe’s AI gigafactories. Ireland and the Netherlands, which got here first, have spent recent years documenting what happens to a grid and to a community when construction outruns planning.
What Alvega raises is narrower than the national argument, and more answerable. When two projects share a substation, a river and a council, who is adding them up?
By Oliver Grant
Photo: Romain D C / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
