EUROPEAN PUBLIC ICT PROVIDERS PRESENT THEIR JOINT POSITION ON SUSTAINABILITY OF PUBLIC DATA CENTRES

Data Center Racks with Wind Turbines in Background for Sustainable Energy Concept. Source: Adobe Stock /artem 

EURITAS CALLS FOR A COMMON EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK WITH OBLIGATORY TARGETS AND INCENTIVES FOR A GREEN TRANSFORMATION OF DATA CENTRES

The rapid expansion of the data centre market entails environmental challenges that inhibit the EU goal of achieving climate neutrality by 2050. Therefore, EURITAS, as the largest platform of European public ICT providers, presented a joint position paper on sustainability of public data centres on October 8, 2024. The position paper calls for the establishment of a comprehensive common European framework for increasing data centre energy efficiency, setting obligatory mandatory targets to be reached as well as incentivizing highly ambitious players.

While data centres already accounted for 2.7% of electricity consumption in the EU in 2018, the demand for data centre capacities and the associated electricity consumption are predicted to rise even further. At the same time, existing data centres often operate below optimal energy efficiency levels. Especially with regards to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, demanding Affordable and Clean Energy, EURITAS sees no alternative to a green transformation of data centres. This path, however, poses great challenges on data centre owners and users and is currently neither accompanied by Europe-wide binding obligations that set concrete measures and targets nor by a common label.

The position paper outlines the importance of energy efficient data centres, stresses the need of setting a clear path through European certification and common standards related to energy supply and energy efficiency of data centres, and announces EURITAS’ next steps and recommendations. In addition to technological measures, these include the further development of Directive (EU) 2023/1791, increasing awareness in the data centre industry, establishing a clear picture about the current state of data centre efficiency, deriving an action plan to enable the green transformation, and implementing energy management systems.

“Data centres are among the largest consumers of electrical power and we can expect that the electricity consumption will continue to grow rapidly as the data centres take on more energy-intensive workloads, such as artificial intelligence. As EURITAS, we are committed to accelerating the green and low-carbon transformation of the data centre industry by prioritizing investment in renewable energy sources, virtualization and server consolidation”, said EURITAS president Saša Bilić at the two-day meeting of EURITAS held on in Helsinki on 7- 8 October.

This is the fourth position paper of the network that serves as a platform for 13 European public ICT service providers in ten different European countries. The previous three documents dealt with digital sovereignty, cloud services, and artificial intelligence (AI). The latest joint position on sustainability of public data centres was formulated against the background of the European Green Deal, outlining the goal of becoming Net Zero by 2050. On the way towards a sustainable future, EURITAS and its members strongly commit to a united sustainability transformation of their data centres which shall be led by the highest standards. In order to achieve this coherent, targeted transformation at the European level, EURITAS offers its expertise to the European Commission to further develop Directive (EU) 2023/1791 and is looking forward to exchanging ideas and best practices with interested stakeholders.