The SDIA welcomes the deal of the European Council and Parliament on the Energy Efficiency Directive

On 10 March 2023, the European Parliament and Council reached a provisional political agreement finalizing the specific text of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED).

This final version of the Directive is a significant win for the SDIA, as it includes many aspects that the SDIA has advocated for that are urgently needed to progress the SDIA Roadmap towards a sustainable digital infrastructure by 2030. 

With regards to transparency and heat recovery, this new Directive is a major milestone, and we look forward to supporting the implementation of the EED into law within each member state. We also appreciate the swift timeline of the directive that has been agreed upon, with the first reporting deadline and application due merely one year from now (15 May 2024).

The highlights:

• Owners and operators of data centers above 500 kW need to make their environmental performance public at least once a year. This includes energy consumption, power utilization, temperature, heat utilization, and use of renewable energy based on the CEN/CENELEC EN 50600-4.
• Data centers with a total rated energy input exceeding 1 MW have to recover their waste heat or prove that it’s not technically or economically feasible to do so.
• The European Commission will establish a European database on data centers that will include all the information reported from each data center (albeit aggregated).
• The Commission will use the data collected from the sector to issue another revision of the EED by 15 May 2025, with further improvements and measures for the data center industry. This will likely include suggestions on setting minimum performance standards, as well as a roadmap towards net-zero emission data centers.
• The metrics and indicators that data centers will have to share are still subject to change and are currently with the Commission (delegated act). The SDIA is part of the process of shaping these metrics, please see our commentary here. However, even the current version is a big step forward in terms of transparency.

Below, we have extracted the relevant passages from the Directive. The full version can be found here.

Annex VIa

• the name of the data centre,
• the name of the owner and operators of the data centre,
• the date of entry into operation and the municipality where the data centre is based;
• the floor area of the data centre;
• the installed power;
• the annual incoming and outgoing data traffic;
• and the amount of data stored and processed within the data centre;
• the performance, during the last full calendar year, of the data centre in accordance with key performance indicators about, inter alia, energy consumption, power utilisation, temperature set points, waste heat utilisation, water usage and use of renewable energy, using as a basis, where applicable, the CEN/CENELEC EN 50600-4 "Information technology - Data centre facilities and infrastructures", until the entry into force of the delegated act pursuant to Article 31 of this Directive.