The European Commission adopted a delegated regulation on 21 September creating a common EU rating scheme for data centres with a capacity above 500 kW. It will rate facilities on their energy and water use, and on what they give back to the grid: waste-heat reuse, added clean generation capacity, and the ability to shift electricity demand.
The regulation now faces a two-month scrutiny period in the European Parliament and Council, which may object to it but cannot amend the text. The Commission expects the first labels on individual data centres in 2027 and a review of the scheme by the end of 2028.
Alongside it the Commission opened a twelve-week consultation on minimum performance standards for data centres, closing on 14 December, to feed a legislative proposal planned for the second quarter of 2027.
The numbers behind the move: EU data centres used around 68 TWh of electricity in 2024, which the International Energy Agency expects to roughly double to 114 TWh by 2030, more than 3% of EU demand, driven largely by AI. The EU also wants to triple its own data centre capacity within five to seven years. The rating scheme is the transparency half of squaring those two ambitions. The Commission’s announcement has the detail.