The Ministry of Energy has included data centre electricity demand of 8.8 gigawatts in the draft national power development plan, or PDP 2026, after finding that applications for electricity from data centre operators totalled as much as 35 gigawatts, close to the country's peak electricity demand of 40 gigawatts. Pongpol Yodmuangcharoen, a spokesman for the Ministry of Energy, said at Gastech 2026 that these applications represent artificial demand, because investors tend to request high reserve quotas and backup power supplies. The draft plan also changes the criterion for measuring power security from the reserve generation margin to the loss of load expectation, or LOLE, and accommodates clean energy under the Solar Rooftop policy for 1 million households, which will add more than 5,000 megawatts of generating capacity. The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand must upgrade the grid into a two-way system with a budget of about 1 billion US dollars, or roughly 35 billion baht, especially in the Eastern Economic Corridor, or EEC, alongside integrating data among the Provincial Electricity Authority, the Metropolitan Electricity Authority, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand and the Energy Regulatory Commission to create a real-time master data network, and enforcing grid connection requirements, or the Grid Code, so that data centres manage themselves before shifting the burden onto the public grid.
Named as one of the agencies required to integrate data into a real-time master data network under the draft PDP2026 grid upgrade plan.
Provincial Electricity AuthorityPrivate± Mixed
Regulationrelevance
Named as one of the agencies that must integrate data into a real-time master data network under the draft PDP2026 grid upgrade plan.
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