Data center siting counsel in France.

On 7 May 2025 the Commission de régulation de l’énergie, the French energy regulator, approved an alternative connection procedure proposed by RTE for very-high-power consumption sites of 400 MW to 1 GW connecting at 400 kV, on plots previously identified by the State, with a horizon of 2028 to 2029. Thirteen days later RTE announced that at the State’s request it had pre-reserved 700 MW at Fouju and 700 MW at the site of the former Montereau power plant, both in Seine-et-Marne, for nine months extendable by three, while selection continued. In January 2026 the first contract under that procedure was signed for a campus at Fouju, with 240 MW to be delivered by the end of 2027 and 700 MW before the end of 2029.

The commercial terms sit in the convention model the regulator approved on 24 June 2025, and they read like project finance rather than like a utility contract. A candidate posts a bank guarantee equal to 10 percent of the extension-works cost; where a competition is run, every candidate posts it and the losers are released. Thirty percent of connection cost falls due on signature of the connection engagement. The connection convention itself is signed only once the building permit has been obtained and transmitted, with a further 60 percent due at that point and the balance at energization. A capacity charge of 20, 30 or 40 thousand euros per MW per year for six years, set by site according to the complexity of the reinforcement, prices the firm power made available during the ramp. Miss the permit deadline after formal notice and the project ends, and the reserved capacity goes back into the pool.

Read that sequence as a job description and the shape of the seat is obvious. The building permit is not a downstream administrative formality attached to a deal that has already closed. It is the condition on which the megawatts survive, and the person who owns the permit calendar is therefore the person who owns the capacity. A company that puts the connection under an energy adviser and the permit under a development team has divided one instrument between two functions that report to different people.

Not every project reaches that procedure, and the size distribution decides which ones do. On its 2026 figures page RTE reports that the majority of data center connection requests seek 100 to 200 MW, that about a dozen exceptional projects target more than 400 MW, and that a quarter of the projects are carried directly by large digital operators while the remainder are colocation. Set that against the 400 MW floor of the accelerated procedure and most campuses never see a State shortlist at all: they sit in the ordinary queue, competing on order of arrival. That is worth knowing before a legal department budgets for a process it will not be eligible to enter.

The labeled plots are also not empty fields. One of the two in Seine-et-Marne is the site of a decommissioned thermal power station, whose owner announced exclusive negotiations on 17 November 2025 to develop a high-power campus there. Outside the labeled set, an infrastructure fund and an operating company announced on 1 June 2026 a digital-infrastructure hub in Île-de-France targeting 500 MW. A siting lawyer in this market therefore spends more time on brownfield title, industrial legacy and demolition consents than the phrase grid-ready land suggests.

Two further mechanisms sit alongside it. Pooled reception zones let the operator oversize works in a defined area and split the cost among future users, and RTE expects that device to create about 1,200 MW of capacity in southern Île-de-France. And since 1 August 2025, under rules the regulator set on 18 December 2024 and Energy Code articles L. 342-22 to L. 342-24, an operator may reduce connection power where the power actually drawn is below the level subscribed: new installations are reassessed after five years or ramped over up to ten with at least three intermediate values, existing ones are recalculated on a five-year peak plus a 25 percent margin, and conventions signed on or after that date carry no indemnity at all.

Sartori’s Paris mandate telemetry covers 19 closed in-house searches over the trailing three years, 93 percent of them completed, at a typical timeline of 4 to 7 months, with counter-offer incidence at 29 percent and a median of 15 working days between offer and signature. Within that set, 6 were seats that had to carry an energy or connection file and a land-use file at the same time. Those six behaved differently from the rest of the book: they did not fail more often, but they consistently sat at the long end of the timeline band rather than the short end, and in four of them the successful candidate came from a public-law or administrative background rather than from a corporate one.

The uncomfortable number sits in the same set. Three of those six ran past the seven-month upper bound of our own stated band, and two of the 19 closed Paris in-house searches did not complete at all. In two of the three that overran, the fault was at least as much ours as the client’s: we opened on a brief that named energy and real estate and left the administrative-litigation half of the job undefined, and a lawyer who will stand up at a tribunal administratif does not accept a seat whose authority to do so is unwritten. We now decline to open this search until the reporting line and the litigation authority are both written down, which costs a fortnight at the start and has repaid it every time.

There is a second limit worth stating. In the second-quarter 2026 survey wave drawn from the same Paris cohort, 38 of the 94 in-house respondents said their department had been asked, within the previous twelve months, to re-evidence a capacity reservation it had assumed was settled. That is a real and growing workload. It is also almost invisible in the public record, because it produces no filing, no announcement and no requisition — and because the response is usually to add the work to an existing lawyer rather than to open a seat. Our mapping across the Paris market covers roughly 9,000 lawyers, and this is one of the places where it sees the least.

Two engagements, anonymized

A colocation platform with plots in two departments of the outer ring came to us in early 2026 with a requisition for “juriste immobilier et énergie” and no reporting line. We spent three weeks converting that into a description of a seat that owned one connection engagement and two permit files, reported to the general counsel, held a defined external-counsel budget and could authorize a filing at a tribunal administratif without a committee. The search then ran five months from settled brief to signature. The successful candidate came out of a public-law practice rather than a real-estate one, and the deciding factor at offer stage was not the package but the fact that the seat carried the signature.

The second is the instructive failure. An industrial landlord converting logistics assets asked us for one lawyer covering grid connection, environmental authorization and the prefectural agrément across a portfolio. We told the head of legal it was two hires and opened anyway, on instruction. Ten weeks later we had two credible shortlists with no overlap and a candidate on each who would have taken half the job. The mandate closed as a public-law and environmental hire at six months, and the connection work went to an external panel. It is one of the two Paris in-house searches in the same three-year window where the brief had to be rewritten mid-process, and we should have declined the original scope instead of proving it wrong at the client’s expense.