EU Sets Up an A to G Rating Scheme for Data Centres as Reporting Covers Only 36% of Sites
The European Commission has adopted a delegated regulation establishing a common EU rating scheme for data centres under the Energy Efficiency Directive. The scheme will use data that operators report on energy and water performance, including power usage effectiveness and water usage effectiveness, to generate electronic labels on an A to G scale for energy and for water. The first labels are to be generated by 15 August 2027 and annually after that, according to the Commission documents.
Alongside the regulation, the Commission published a report to the European Parliament and the Council on the first round of data reported by data centres for 2024. The recast Energy Efficiency Directive, adopted in 2023, requires operators of data centres with an installed IT power demand of at least 500 kW to report key performance indicators to a European database each year. The low share of in-scope data centres that reported suggests that many operators either did not comply or were not identified by national authorities.
Power usage effectiveness is the ratio of total facility energy to the energy used by IT equipment. Operators report through a European database run by the Commission, and national authorities are responsible for identifying in-scope facilities and enforcing reporting. The very low share of heat reused, about 1.8%, reflects the fact that most data centres are not connected to district heating networks. Data centres are a growing source of electricity demand in Europe, concentrated in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin, and increasingly in the Nordic countries, Spain and Italy.
The EU has also been developing policy to attract AI investment, including plans for large AI computing facilities. Water use by data centres has become a local concern in parts of southern Europe, where drought has reduced water availability, and in other regions during heatwaves. Beyond efficiency, the main constraint on data centre growth in several European markets is grid capacity.