INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE POWERED BY THE DCA
Regulation is coming to the data centre sector
John Booth , Chair DCA Energy Efficiency SIG & MD , Carbon 3IT , discusses who will be regulating the data centre sector and what the implications will be .
The data centre has always been subject to regulation , but this is more by default rather than direct and targeted legislation . We fall under the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 , for power systems , the Energy Performance of Buildings ( England & Wales ) Regulations 2012 , for cooling systems and recently the Energy Saving Opportunities Scheme Regulations 2014 the EU / UK Emissions Trading Systems legislation . These are general regulations and we fall into them by virtue of the nature of data centres which comprises of power , cooling , UPS / Generators , fire detection and suppression systems etc .
While compliance can be a pain for smaller organisations , larger global colocation and cloud operators will have specific staff for compliance tasks , however , the consensus is that there is too much individual legislation requiring attention . Trade bodies and associations such as The DCA and TechUK continue to highlight these issues at Government level on behalf of the sector – they acknowledge that there is still a long way to go . There are three distinct and separate pieces of EU legislation that are now specifically targeting data centres .
EU Taxonomy
The first is the EU Taxonomy regulations which focus on investment companies with the intention that they will ONLY invest in sustainable projects , with a series of requirements that are outlined in the EU Taxonomy Compass .
For data centres , there is a requirement to implement the expected best practices as contained in the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres ( Energy Efficiency ) ( EUCOC ) or the CLC / TR EN50600-99-1 and that the implementation of those practices is verified by an independent third party every three years . This requirement caused some concern with auditors , as neither of these guides or standards are written in an ‘ auditable ’ format . Approaches were made to EU Directorate DG CNCT to address this problem . The result was a commission to the TIC Council , the trade body for certification bodies and audit companies , to develop an auditable version of the EUCOC . This work is complete and we await the publication of the revised and auditable EUCOC best practices . These will be published by the EU-JRC as an annex to the 14th Edition of the EUCOC due for publication in Q1 2023 .
It ’ s important to note that this audit can be required for UK data centres if the investment fund has European investors , indeed it can be required globally .
Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive ( CSRD )
This piece of legislation requires qualifying organisations to report sustainability indicators as well as energy www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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