EU appears to find datacenter emissions easier to offset than lobbyists

The European Union's proposed environmental rating system for datacenters may be amended in response to lobbying from IT industry heavyweights, making it easier to offset greenhouse gas emissions using clean energy certificates. According to the Financial Times, the European Commission is weakening its original proposals after pressure from datacenter operators and tech giants. The newspaper claims to have seen the revised draft of the regulations, set to be discussed by representatives of member states on Thursday. We asked the Commission for comment on the leaked draft. The Commission published a draft regulation in March proposing an A-to-G rating scale for datacenters, based on their energy and water efficiency. The system is intended to incentivize greater sustainability in their operations, especially as bit barn capacity is expected to expand greatly over the next decade, thanks to huge demand for AI and cloud services. That earlier draft specified that facilities could offset greenhouse gas emissions by investing in clean energy certificates, but only if the projects concerned were in the same region as the data campus itself. It is understood that this has been amended so that facilities operating in one country can offset their emissions by obtaining certificates from renewable projects in a different EU state. The proposed change was made at the behest of companies and lobby groups that argued it would increase their operating costs. The EU's efforts to press datacenters and other large energy users into adopting greater efficiency and sustainability measures have met with varying degrees of pushback. Last year, the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP) expressed concerns about standards for data campus efficiency the European Commission was considering, based on feedback from mandatory reporting introduced in the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED). The group lists tech giants AWS, Microsoft, and Google among its signatories, as well as datacenter operators like Digital Realty, NorthC, and Vantage Data Centers. Also last year, the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body was critical of the EU's Water Resilience Strategy, warning that burdensome regulatory demands regarding water use might prompt operators to build outside Europe. Another body, the European Data Centre Association (EUDCA), issued a statement this week affirming its "unwavering commitment" to climate-neutral datacenters and sustainable digital growth. But it warned that Europe will not be able to "unlock the digital infrastructure capacity required for its AI and digital ambitions" without addressing structural challenges in the electricity system, including expansion of transmission and distribution grids, faster and more transparent permitting processes, and stable access to low-carbon electricity. Meanwhile, Europe needs a policy framework that integrates water and energy efficiency if it wants to keep growing datacenter capacity to support its AI and cloud computing ambitions, according to a recent report. The proposed environmental rating system is still listed as due for adoption in the third quarter of this year, but debate over the changes may push that back further. ®