Greenhouse Datacenters has once again reported under the European Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) and did not mark a single data point as commercially confidential, even though the scheme allows it. All figures on energy consumption and efficiency are publicly available from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO). That is a deliberate choice: if you offer colocation, you're selling trust.
Why public
For the customers of a colocation data center, the facility's energy consumption isn't an abstraction. It feeds into their own energy bill, their own sustainability reporting and, more and more often, the requirements their own customers place on them. A provider that is selective about what it shares here shifts that problem onto its customer.
That's why Greenhouse doesn't treat reporting as a form to fill in as sparingly as possible. It treats it as information that belongs in the value chain. The same thinking is built into the design. Cooling, airflow and capacity utilization aren't items optimized after the fact to hit a number. They are choices made up front. That's where efficiency and environmental impact are determined, not in the reporting about them.
"For us, energy efficiency isn't a compulsory exercise, it's a starting point," says Alan Lucas, CISO of Greenhouse Datacenters. "It's the same logic as in security: what you don't measure, you can't control. And if you don't dare to publish something in a report like this, you probably don't have your house in order."
Two obligations, one environmental track
Under the Dutch Environmental Activities Decree (Besluit activiteiten leefomgeving), a data center counts as an environmentally impactful activity. This results in two obligations. Both serve an environmental objective, but they are separate from each other.
The data center energy efficiency reporting and publication obligation comes from Article 12 of the EED. It applies to data centers with an installed IT power of at least 500 kilowatts. Greenhouse submits this data every year to RVO, which forwards the reports to the European Commission.
The energy savings obligation is national legislation. Greenhouse is subject to the energy savings information obligation (informatieplicht energiebesparing), with the Haaglanden Environmental Service (Omgevingsdienst Haaglanden, ODH) as the supervisory authority. EED reporting aims for transparency and comparability at European level. The energy savings obligation is about actually taking measures.
Built into the process, not a one-off
The reporting system is young. The European Commission's dashboard now lists 776 data centers with a combined consumption of 16.7 TWh¹. The Commission itself notes that not all member states are fully represented yet. Colocation raises a question of its own: customers manage their own IT infrastructure, so responsibility for energy efficiency is shared. The measurement methodology is fixed. The division between provider and customer is not.
Greenhouse is actively working out that division in consultation with RVO and the ODH. In colocation, server settings are the customer's responsibility. For those, Greenhouse follows the approach the industry associations and the joint environmental services set out in 2024: an annual audit of a sample of one hundred randomly selected servers. The audit is recorded in a logbook that the supervisory authority can request and spot-check in real time.
This makes reporting an embedded process rather than an annual project. That is also the precondition for the comparability the directive is about: figures only mean something if they are produced the same way next year.
The figures
Data centers are energy-intensive, and reporting on it doesn't change that. What can change is how much of that energy ends up as computing power. At its most recent inspection, the ODH established a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.15 for the data center at Industriestraat 53 in Naaldwijk.
By comparison, the weighted European average in the Commission's dashboard is 1.36¹. The best-performing EU country averages 1.15², the same value the ODH established at Greenhouse. The same assessment also shows that smaller data centers typically come in higher than the largest ones.
What's next
In the next phase of the directive, it won't stop at reporting. The European Commission is working on an energy efficiency package for data centers that includes a European rating scheme, and is also starting work on minimum performance standards. A draft regulation for that rating scheme went out for consultation this spring. Transparency about energy consumption is still a choice today. That's changing.
¹ European Commission, Policy Reporting Platform, aggregated data center reporting data, accessed [date]. https://link.europa.eu/q7x39t
² European Commission (DG Energy, AIT, Borderstep and EY), "Assessment of the energy performance and sustainability of data centres in EU, First technical report," July 2025. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2833/3168794