Israel's electricity regulator wants no single new data center to take more than 200 MW from the grid. According to sources in the plenum of the Electricity Authority quoted by Calcalist's CTech on 14 October, a draft decision on grid connections with that ceiling is to go out for public comment on Sunday 18 October. A three-week consultation follows; the plenum will then weigh the objections and publish a final framework. The Authority did not answer CTech's request for comment.
27 GW Of Requests On An 18.8 GW System
The numbers explain the hurry. Developers have asked for connections totalling about 27,000 MW, while Israel's installed generation capacity is 18,800 MW. Average consumption is around 9,000 MW, and the peak reached 17,300 MW in August 2025. Noga, the system operator, holds connection requests for 50 facilities larger than 200 MW. The Authority had already stopped taking new data center applications for 140 days in June.
How fast demand will really grow is disputed. Noga works with 3.5 % a year in the long term and 5.2 % in the near term, the Dayan Committee put it at no more than 3.2 %, and the Forum of Private Electricity Producers expects 4.2 % and consumption doubling within 15 years. The Forum also projects data centers at about 7 billion kWh a year by 2030, roughly 2,100 MW, and estimates cited by CTech put them at around a fifth of national consumption by then. Ireland is facing similar arithmetic, as Moody's figures showed this week.
Projects That Would Have To Shrink
Two of the largest applications show what the ceiling does. Mega DC, controlled by Zahi Nahmias, wants 1,100 MW in Hadera on the site of the former Alliance tire factory, and SDS, controlled by Yossi Schonfeld, has asked for 875 MW in Nesher. Neither would qualify as planned. A developer executive quoted by CTech still called 200 MW reasonable, since Israel has no data centers of that size and its generation capacity does not allow very large ones.
Officials argue that the limit lets more facilities connect while protecting grid stability, because the sudden failure of one very large load can disturb the system frequency. Separately, a Knesset committee has approved a bill to advance AI server farms as national infrastructure, RuntimeWire notes.
Off The Grid At Short Notice
The questions that decide the cost for operators are still open, CTech reports: whether data centers may connect directly to power plants and bypass the Israel Electric Corporation grid, and whether they can be required to disconnect at short notice. The same executive called short-notice disconnection a deal-breaker and said that backup generators or storage for a 200 MW facility could make a project uneconomic.
He has a point. A data center that can be told to come off the grid is no longer buying standby plant for the rare outage. It is buying plant that may run for hours whenever the system is short, and in Israel that means hot summer days. Fuel storage, emissions permits and the cooling of the engines all follow from that. The frequency argument also cuts both ways: a 200 MW site that transfers its whole load to its own generators in one step is exactly the kind of sudden change the regulator wants to avoid, so the transfer sequence matters as much as the cap. For anyone planning data center power in the country, Sunday's draft is the document to read.
Sources: CTech (Calcalist), RuntimeWire
