Data centres
specific information public. By 15 May, 2025, the European Commission will prepare an assessment and report, potentially proposing to improve energy efficiency in data centres.
According to Bertoldi, Article 12 also has broader aims on establishing data centre sustainability indicators, which the European Commission has been preparing for with three workshops over spring 2023. “An important novelty,” he says, “is that Member States shall ensure that data centres with a total rated energy input exceeding 1MW utilise the waste heat or other waste heat recovery applications, unless they can show that it is not technically or economically feasible.”
Cooling systems
Cooling systems play an important role in data centres, ensuring that equipment is not damaged by high temperatures or humidity. Such a situation would also lead to uncomfortable working conditions within the centre itself. Naturally, this means data centres require a lot of power – not ideal for the environment. “Cooling is an important energy consumption factor in data centres, often requiring as much energy as the energy for processing information in servers hosted,” notes Bertoldi. To be fair, there are some solutions here. So-called immersion cooling – literally bathing hardware in dielectric liquids – is one increasingly popular way of cutting the carbon footprint of data centres across European banking. Certainly, this is clear enough across the European banking sector. Crédit Agricole, for instance, uses immersion cooling systems from Asperitas at its Mainvilliers data centres near Chartres in France.
At the same time, Crédit Agricole is pushing ahead to install multiple cooling modules in two of its data centres. Barclays, for its part, has announced a £500m investment in climate tech startups through 2027. Among other winners is HT Materials Science, an Irish company whose ‘Maxwell’ heat transfer fluid reduces energy consumption in commercial buildings by up to 15%.
“There are new cooling solutions that dramatically reduce cooling consumption,” Bertoldi summarises, adding that change can equally come from how banks conceive of their data centres. The most obvious solution, he suggests, is to reduce the demand for cooling by increasing the temperature set points in the data rooms. Companies such as Google and Intel all praise this approach in their own data centres, but as Bertoldi says, progress is slow – perhaps due to the risk of allowing less time for data centres to recover from a cooling failure.
A further solution involves what Bertoldi describes as “free cooling” – which some northern Europe data centres are already making use of. BNP Paribas relocated its data centres to Iceland, where it uses the
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
chilly Nordic air to maintain data centres without relying on machines. Using more efficient cooling systems, such as liquid cooling over traditional air cooling, could also reduce waste energy. “The CoC Best Practices recommend all these solutions,” says Bertoldi. Optimising cooling systems, at any rate, is just one area where the EU Commission is encouraging data centres to be greener and reach its carbon-neutral targets. Banks, for their part, are joining the push, with Banque BPCE signing its four data centres up to the CoC commitment to cut its carbon footprint and optimise energy efficiency across its sites. Data centre operators have equally responded to the ongoing green expectations through another initiative. The Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, launched in 2021, and made up of over 100 data centre operators and trade associations, aims to make data centres climate-neutral by 2030. These varied advances notwithstanding, the CoC is not without its challenges. As Bertoldi reiterates, the policy is voluntary, with not every data centre participating. A related difficulty, Bertoldi continues, is that the CoC is based on self-reporting – albeit checked by the JRC. Luckily, the Assessment Framework will help solve this difficulty as it provides auditors with the correct means to assess whether data centres have properly applied practices from the CoC. It seems clear, at any rate, that data centres, and our fight to make them green, are both here to stay. The same could surely be said of banks themselves. With never-ending technological developments – from artificial intelligence to streaming to the cloud – data centres play a critical role in the sector. Given all this, it makes sense that Bertoldi is so passionate about the importance of the CoC going forward. “The full implementation of the CoC Best Practices makes a lot of sense,” he says, “as data centre operators will save money on their energy bills and contribute to [reducing] greenhouse gas emission.” ●
Above: With over 130 signed up, banks will play an important role in the Net-Zero Banking Alliance.
Opposite page: Data centres are using innovations – including so-called ‘immersion cooling’ – to become more efficient.
500
The number of data centres participating in the CoC.
European Commission +130
The number of Banks committed to the Net-Zero Banking Alliance.
United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP Finance Initiative)
21
LightField Studios/
Shutterstock.com
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