A draft delegated act by the European Commission, which Agence Europe obtained on Monday 6 July, sets out the conditions for developing a common EU rating scheme to compare the energy and environmental performance of data centres located in the European Union.
The delegated act, which is currently being drafted, will be adopted “in the coming weeks”, according to a Commission spokesperson. It will in particular contain a renewable energy factor (REF) used to compare the environmental performance of European Union data centres.
According to the provisional document, the delegated act, which supplements the Energy Efficiency Directive (2023/1791) and Delegated Regulation (2024/1364) on the EU rating scheme, aims to address the growing increase in the energy needs of European data centres. According to data from the International Energy Agency and the European electricity lobby, cited by the Commission, these accounted for 68 TWh of electricity in 2024 and could account for 114 TWh by 2030.
According to the Commission, the aim of this new delegated act is to reduce water and energy consumption and promote low-carbon energy, notably through networks and the reuse of waste heat.
Public performance indicators. The draft delegated act provides for data centres to be assessed by means of electronic labels. These labels will be publicly available in the dedicated European database. However, the other information and performance indicators transmitted to the Member States and the European Commission will be treated as confidential data.
Scope. The draft delegated act excludes data centres operating exclusively in the service of defence or civil protection from the obligation to provide these data. These data will also be provided voluntarily by operators of data centres whose installed electricity consumption is below 500 kW and by centres that are not yet operational. The latter may provide the data for their first year of operation.
Performance thresholds. The draft annexes present the energy performance thresholds (from A to F) for the various sustainability indicators selected, namely energy efficiency and water use. These are based on existing data collected under previous legislation, in order to avoid an administrative burden for Member States and operators.
Nuclear and geothermal energy could be included. Article 6 of the delegated act provides for a Commission review by 31 December 2028 and every three years thereafter. It introduces the possibility of changing the scales used in the label, adjusting the values, introducing additional indicators or certification of the data declared, and “factor in the consumption of all low-emission forms of energy, including but not limited to, nuclear, geothermal, district cooling, electricity coming from batteries and energy storage systems”. The Commission is also reserving the possibility of simplifying the system at a later stage, as part of a cost-reduction approach.
In a letter sent to the European Commission on 12 May, French MEP Christophe Grudler (Renew Europe) had asked for nuclear energy and hydropower to be included in the mandatory sustainability label for European data centres (see EUROPE 13872/16). On 22 May, the European Commission responded by assuring that it wanted “the development of AI, cloud computing and digital infrastructure to be aligned with our climate and sustainable development goals” (see EUROPE 13873/18).
To see the draft delegated act: https://aeur.eu/f/mq6 (Original version in French by Nadège Delépine)