SUSTAINABILITY
Embodied carbon enters the accounts Construction now weighs heavily on data centre operators emissions. Microsoft’ s 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report shows total emissions rising 25 % year on year in FY25, driven primarily by data centre expansion, with Scope 3 still the dominant category.
Concrete and steel sit at the centre of that problem. EcoDataCenter’ s life cycle assessments find its crosslaminated timber buildings in Falun carry up to 60 % less embodied carbon than comparable conventional structures. Where timber is less practical, the Open Compute Project is running low-carbon concrete trials with Meta, Google, AWS and Microsoft.
Turning waste heat into a product Liquid cooling raises the temperature of rejected heat, improving the case for reuse. Germany’ s Energy Efficiency Act sets a minimum reused-energy share of 10 % for data centres entering operation from 1 July 2026, rising to 15 % from July 2027 and 20 % from July 2028, subject to specified exemptions.
The constraint is offtake. EcoDataCenter reports that reused energy accounted for 0.5 % of its Falun campus consumption in 2025, as new capacity outpaced existing heat-recovery links. In Rjukan, Green Mountain addressed the offtake problem by pairing with a trout farm 800 metres away.
ENERGY REUSE FACTOR( ERF)
Defined in the EN 50600-4-6 standard, ERF measures the share of a data centre’ s total energy consumption that is reused outside the facility, for example in district heating, agriculture or industrial processes. A site that exports a quarter of its energy as useful heat has an ERF of 0.25. ERF complements PUE, which measures how efficiently energy is used inside the facility. Germany now sets minimum ERF levels for new data centres and the EU’ s proposed rating scheme will capture waste heat reuse.
72 October 2026