Nour Rteil | Sept. 1, 2023

Image credit: European Union 2018 - EP

All EU data centers with an installed IT power demand of 500 KW or more, are mandated to report and follow the rules set by the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) to commit to the EU’s energy efficiency targets.  

What’s new?

The directive was recently updated in July 2023 to raise the level of the EU energy efficiency target by an additional 11.7% reduction of energy consumption by 2030, compared to the 2020 projections. Additionally, EU countries will now be required to prioritise energy efficiency in policymaking, planning, and major investments, following the energy efficiency first principle. Another key element of the 2023 amendment was the introduction of a specific mandate for the public sector to achieve an annual energy consumption reduction of 1.9%.

This new target introduces higher standards and additional elements to be reported including:

 • Total data center energy consumption

 • Temperature set points

 • ICT equipment utilization

Here’s some of the key EED sustainability indicators that need to be reported by data centers.

EED and the EN50600-4 KPIs

In addition to the above, the directive requires 4 of the 8 EN50600-4 KPIs to be reported, as marked in the table below.

ITEEsv and ITEUsv KPIs, although not yet required to be publicly reported, can be acquired from the submitted indicator data.

Next steps:

This new legislation is expected to be published in the EU Official Journal in September 2023 and enter into force 20 days after publication.

The next EED report will be due on May 15, 2024, so data center operators need to act fast and set the proper strategies and plans to acquire all the necessary data before then.

Interact revised reports:

We are committed to helping data centers with their environmental reporting and are continuously improving our reports to cover key areas that data center operators can use to assess their current environmental impact and track progress.

Our solution provides data centers with estimates for 4 of the 8 EN50600-4 standards (PUE, ITEEsv, ITEUsv, CUE), in addition to other attributes that are not yet required by EED such as scope 3 estimations for servers, water usage in electricity production, bill of materials for servers, server age distribution, and server efficiency grading.

Considering the recent amendment, we have added the following metrics to our reports:

 • Data Centre Idle Coefficient (DCIC)

 • Confidence of server utilization

 • Total TB of data storage

We are keeping an eye on when the legislation will be published and will continuously revise our reports to ensure that most requirements are covered.