European Code of Conduct on Data Center Energy Efficiency

The European Code of Conduct on Data Center Energy Efficiency is a voluntary European Commission program whose members commit to energy efficiency best practices and report their consumption yearly. The code was born in 2008 at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, at a time when few operators measured the consumption of a data hall other than on the utility bill. It rests on voluntary membership under two statuses. The participant, the operator, registers one or more sites, commits to implement the expected practices and reports its energy readings every year. The endorser, a manufacturer, engineering firm or integrator, promotes the code without running a site. The bulk of the program is the best practice guide, revised every year, which sorts more than a hundred measures by area (management, IT, cooling, power) and by status, expected or optional. Long a goodwill label, it gained weight in 2021: the EU green taxonomy makes its expected practices the condition for activity 8.1, data processing and hosting, with verification by an independent third party. An operator that funds a campus with a green bond therefore has to be able to show it. On the underwriting side, two readings. Participant status says something about the site's metering discipline, which is worth something in a questionnaire, since an operator that meters consumption hall by hall also knows its load and its margins. But several practices in the guide push supply air temperature toward the top of the ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) allowable ranges. And every degree saved on the bill is a degree of margin lost on a heat wave afternoon, when a chiller trips.