The European Commission has asked the data center sector to comment on the demands of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED).

The EED (Directive 2012/27/EU), was published in September and requires data centers to report on their energy performance and sustainability.

It is part of a broad set of energy efficiency measures being put in place by the European Union, as part of the bloc's effort to reach net zero by 2050, and the more recent Fit for 55 initiative to reduce greenhouse gases across all sectors by at least 55 percent before 2030.

The exact format of the reports required from data centers, and the information they will contain, has not been fully defined, although quite a lot has been decided, and set out in Annex VII of the Directive.

The data will be due next year, and will have to cover the period from May 2023. It will include floor area, installed power, data volumes, energy consumption, PUE, temperature set points, waste heat utilization, water usage, and use of renewable energy.

Robert Nuij, deputy head of the EC's unit for energy efficiency policy and financing, told the German Datacenter Conference in September: “We are currently working on what we call delegated access or more detailed rules about what exactly one should report and how to measure what should be reported.

"We're relying very much on the existing standards in this area, and we're not doing this by ourselves.”

The draft regulation is available here and is open for feedback for four weeks - until midnight Brussels time on January 8, 2024.

Any feedback received will be published, and considered in future versions.