Amazon Web Services is encountering grid connection wait times of up to seven years for new European data center projects, a delay that exceeds the usual finance and physical construction timelines by quite some margin.
This is according to Amazon’s head of energy markets and regulation for AWS EMEA, Pamela McDougall, who, in an interview with Reuters, said that timelines for getting a grid connection have become one of the biggest deciding factors in Amazon’s data center investments. “And we’re finding more and more across Europe that certainty of the delivery date has continued to be delayed,” she said during the interview.
Grid queues into the 2030s
McDougall says that AWS typically develops a data center in roughly two years, with connection queues in the U.S. averaging one to three years as per the International Energy Agency. In several European markets, however, such schedules are now subordinate to grid connection queues that stretch well into the 2030s. In Italy and…