EU’s EED recast set to create reporting challenges

The European Commission’s (EC’s) proposed recast of its Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) sets out new and strict reporting requirements for data centers operating in the EU. If passed, data centers with 100 kilowatts or more total installed IT power demand (from server, storage and network equipment) will have to report their energy performance every year, including details on data traffic, quantity of data stored, water use, energy consumption, heat re-use and power utilization (see Table 1).

Table 1. Reporting requirements of proposed EED recast

These reporting requirements raise several concerns for data centers. One concern is that some of the information is simply difficult to collect — at least for some. Most colocation operators do not currently have control or insight into the data traffic, storage and processing being performed on their customers’ IT equipment. For example, it will be challenging for a large retail colocation data center to collect, normalize and aggregate data from tens or hundreds of IT operators with different data collection and management systems into a coherent, accurate and standardized report.