Alliance Spokesperson Dr Béla Waldhauser: “Disclosing business secrets, confidential data and data traffic does not contribute to greater energy efficiency in the EU!”
With the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), the European Commission wants to increase energy efficiency in the EU. The new directive is intended to contribute to the implementation of the “Fit for 55” package announced by the Commission in 2021. This aims to have the EU become climate-neutral by 2050 and includes the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 per cent by 2030, in comparison to 1990 levels. Article 12 of the new directive requires operators of data centres with an IT capacity of 500 kW or more to publish their energy efficiency data in the future. In its draft of the delegated regulation published in December 2023, the EU Commission put forward a proposal to specify the reporting obligations.
The Alliance for the Strengthening of Digital Infrastructures in Germany, founded under the umbrella of eco – Association of the Internet Industry, is in favour of common European standards for the energy-efficient and climate-neutral operation of data centres. However, the reporting obligations currently provided for in the EED Delegated Act should be kept within reasonable limits.
Dr Béla Waldhauser, Spokesperson of the Alliance for the Strengthening of Digital Infrastructures in Germany, has the following to say:
“Some of the mandatory reporting requirements listed in the EED Delegated Act clearly overshoot the mark or impose considerable additional work on data centre operators. Disclosing sensitive business secrets, confidential data and data streams does not contribute to greater energy efficiency in the operation of data centres. The Commission should scrap such KPIs in order to avoid imposing even more reporting obligations on the industry than those already stipulated in the national German Energy Efficiency Act.
“Take the example of data traffic: For data centre operators, calculating their data traffic entails a significant amount of additional work, while colocation providers are not even able to provide such values.
“A second example is data protection: the Delegated Act does not make it clear which KPIs are confidential and which can be disclosed. This can lead to different interpretations on the part of Member States, which in turn would not be good for competition.”
The eco Alliance is also calling for data centre operators to be given sufficient time for complete, representative reporting. To date, the EED Delegated Act has only extended the reporting deadline for colocation and co-hosting data centres from May 2024 to May 2026. From the perspective of the eco Alliance, this deadline should also apply to all other data centre models.
