The European Union's long-awaited green scorecard for datacenters has finally been released, ending a period of regulatory limbo. The sustainability labels are now available to operators, after repeated delays in the legislative process.
The labels are designed to provide a common framework for assessing the environmental performance of datacenters. This gives both operators and customers a standardized way to compare energy use and other sustainability metrics.
The European Commission is already looking beyond the labels. It is now examining the possibility of introducing minimum efficiency standards, which would go further than voluntary labelling and impose binding requirements on datacenters.