EU Eases Data Center Carbon Emission Rules, Reflecting Big Tech Demands

The European Union (EU) has reportedly drafted new regulations that would allow data centers to offset their carbon emissions in a more cost-effective way. Under these rules, data centers would be recognized as having offset their emissions even if they use clean energy certificates that do not match the actual time or region of their electricity consumption.

Reuters Yonhap News Agency

According to the Financial Times (FT) on July 2 (local time), the EU initially planned to introduce a so-called "traffic light" system to evaluate the environmental friendliness of data centers based on their energy and water consumption. However, the EU now intends to significantly ease these requirements.

The draft released in early March stipulated that, in order to offset fossil fuel emissions, data centers had to invest in certificates from clean energy projects that began operating within the past 10 years. The recognized clean energy projects were required to generate electricity in the same time zone and region as the data center. In other words, only additional solar or wind power produced in the time and region where the data center actually uses electricity would be accepted as a means to offset emissions.

However, the latest draft obtained by FT shows that these time and regional matching requirements have been significantly relaxed. For example, a data center in Germany using electricity from coal-fired power plants would be able to offset its emissions by purchasing solar power certificates produced in Spain.

FT explained that this means the EU has largely accommodated pressure from big tech companies. Corporations and lobbying groups such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and the European Data Centre Association had urged the EU to eliminate several requirements, citing concerns about rising costs.

Some accounting and climate change experts point out that such certificates have little actual effect on reducing emissions. Kilian Daly, Secretary General of the think tank EnergyTag, said, "If data centers are not operated with new regional renewable energy that is linked in real time to their power consumption, it will drive up demand for imported gas, which is subject to high price volatility." He added that this could lead to higher energy prices and undermine energy security.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.