Speaking with Capacity at Datacloud Energy Europe, Michael Winterson, secretary general of the European Data Centre Association (EUDCA), shared how conversations around data centre policy are ramping up across the continent.
As the industry remains critical across the digital infrastructure world, policy alignment is becoming more important to enable strong and sustainable data centre development. Policies like the EU’s data centre energy efficiency package, the upcoming Grids Package and the Cloud and AI Development Act are being introduced soon – demonstrating, Winterson said, the industry is trying to move quickly on efficiency standards.
“The problem we’ve got it a lot of the data being collected is only one or two years old, so we’re working carefully with [the EU] on creating a system that times the development of these labelling systems that are being built,” he added.
Will data centres achieve 2030 carbon neutrality?
Plenty of conversations at Datacloud Energy Europe involved how to make the data centre industry more sustainable, energy efficient and less impactful on the grid. A significant part of this is the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP) – formed with EUDCA – pledging to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030 through 100% clean energy matching, high PUE targets and circular economy practices.
EUDCA has been eager to support Europe in hitting a set of climate neutral targets ever since it first heard about the European Green Deal in 2019.
“These carbon neutral goals were quickly followed by the Europe fit for the digital age [proposal by the European Commission] that stated this would be Europe’s digital decade,” Winterson explained. “They want to see a mass increase in the adoption of digitalisation in the 2020s for benefit in the 2030s.”
He added: “This is a set of targets on efficiency, renewable energy utilisation and other things such as water stewardship, possibly heat reuse or circular economics. There’s a large plan we built up and funnily enough, the energy efficiency directive is pretty much already following it.”
The industry is well on its way to becoming more efficient, Winterson shared, as it hopes to be widely carbon neutral by 2030 – but work is still needed.
“We’re well ahead of 90% [efficiency] right now,” he said. “The problem is going to be the impact on the grid, as we start looking at potentially doubling or tripling capacity over the next seven years.
“The big issue is how to avoid grid congestion.”
Overcoming challenges to serve demand
Another significant challenge currently for data centres is balancing AI demand with a need for sustainable digital infrastructure. In EUDCA’s mind, policy can support a sustainable expansion.
“All of the energy we need to grow and build out an ‘AI brain’ in Europe can be more than offset by energy savings through the adoption of AI into things like the energy sector,” Winterson said. “We’re also saying to the grids and energy generators to look at adopting technology faster – your savings will outweigh our burden.”
Having recently published its State of European Data Centres 2026 report, EUDCA found that the biggest challenges remain in grid capacity and land constraints.
“The issue is not sustainability, but rather, can we grow according to the demand that we see?” Winterson explained. “From last year’s report to this one, we saw a doubling of announced capital investment in Europe – can our supply chain handle that? Can we get grid access? Can we get staff to run these data centres?”
He added: “The big issue is how we work with society at large on making sure we have the land rights, that the supply chains can deliver the equipment and that ultimately when we need it, the energy is there.”
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