The data centre industry is ‘underprepared’ for the forthcoming regulatory changes and new reporting thresholds, despite monitoring requirements starting in May 2023, according to Stephen Lorimer, Group Technical Director at Keysource, the international datacentre and critical environment specialists.

Speaking at an event recently, Steve discussed The European Parliament’s review of the European Commission’s Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) recast since last year, with the directive set to be signed into law this year.  He reminded the audience that in May 2024, the EED will require data centres in the EU with an annual energy use of over 2780 MWh to publicly report their energy performance.

“There will be an increased requirement on enterprises and data centre operators to publish energy action audit plans publicly, but they need to act quickly as the reporting period began in May 2023. So, in real terms you should have started!” urged Steve.  “Reporting demands will require colocation operators to source capacity and throughput data from their customers and data centre operators will need to move quickly to examine their ability to comply and ultimately create a strategy to comply with the new reporting thresholds and establish a data collection and management processes for the required information.”

He went on to say that, “The new thresholds for reporting from Article 11 and 11A have changed and due to the global nature of the industry, will likely cover nearly all data centre operators.  This involves reporting on annual incoming and outgoing data traffic, the amount of data stored and processed within the data centre, in addition to   the temperature set points, power, water, and carbon usage effectiveness; energy reuse factor; renewable energy use and their cooling effectiveness ratio.”

“At Keysource we welcome greater transparency for the data centre industry.  In order to comply with our climate change targets our industry needs to be accountable and these regulations will help to ensure everyone is working toward Net Zero.  There will also be a number of benefits associated with the new regulatory changes such as cost savings, and a potential for increased investment as investors will be able to make better ROI predictions using historic data. We are working with  a number of clients to help them prepare and to maximise the potential benefits,” Stephen concluded.