EuroDaCe - the European Data Center Database

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All data centers currently recorded in the EuroDaCe database are displayed on the map above. Yellow markers indicate a data center when only a point location is known. Blue markers indicate that the spatial contour of the data center facility (or the site it is located) is also known. Zooming in and clicking on any feature displays the data center name (if its known).

What is it?

EuroDaCe is a project to document publicly available information about data centers in the European Union, with a focus on variables that indicate their environmental footprint.

The project is inspired by the IM3 Project database that is documenting US data centers. The initial dataset contains locations and other geospatial data for the existing data center facilities in the European Union. These data center locations were derived from OpenStreetMap (OSM), a crowd-sourced geospatial database. Data points from the OSM database form the basis on which additional variables can be added.

Why now?

As data center capacity is expanding at rapid pace globally, the environmental footprint of these facilities comes into sharper focus. The list of potential environmental and socioeconomic stresses associated with data centers includes most prominently: increased electricity demand, which leads to direct and indirect Greenhouse Gas Emissions, e-waste of IT components, and direct and indirect water usage for the cooling of facilities and the production of electricity. In a first post of a series dedicated to the measurement of data center environmental footprints we reviewed the conceptual thought frameworks and substantial challenges involved:

  • There is substantial confusion about data center terminology, which complicates forming clear and unambiguous overviews.
  • There is lack of transparency about environmental impacts, in terms of the range of metrics being disclosed, their granularity and the consistency of reporting between different entities.
  • While GHG emissions reporting has well articulated methodologies following the GHG Protocol (though not lacking in controversial options among its prescriptions, e.g., market-based versus location-based reporting), the quantification and reporting of other stresses, such as water, is more complicated and suffers from less streamlined methodologies.
  • There are significant uncertainties both around current environmental footprints, and even more so about potential future scenarios.

Clearly transparency and standardization can help more informed decision making by all stakeholders.

What can be done?

An objective, accurate, comprehensive view of data center environmental impacts across Europe is a major task. It relies non-trivially on disclosures of key metrics by the entities involved, which in turns depends on policies and regulations. Yet while such disclosures are still limited, compiling and integrating publicly available data can already reduce uncertainty about current footprints, or at least highlight discrepancies and pinpoint problem areas.

In a previous methodologies post we outlined current measurement methodologies and documented their quantitative prescriptions in mathematical form. In summary:

  • Two important data center impacts (GHG emissions and water usage) can be associated to the operational energy consumption of the IT and non-IT equipment of the data center.
  • Energy consumption can be measured by a mix of direct and indirect methods.
  • The floor space approach is a proxy (secondary data) method that is widely used to estimate data center capacity.
  • The key environmental impact metrics can then be linked to estimated floor space, subject to the availability of certain intensity coefficients.

The floor space approach, combined with other data and assumptions motivates the adoption of open geospatial data as a key input source.

Towards an open source data infrastructure

While geospatial data are an important and non-trivial component of the input data set, they are but the starting point. In a previous infrastructure post we searched for publicly available data about the environmental impact of data centers and explored how to organize them inside the Equinox platform using a limited (sample) data set. In summary:

  • There is a range of possible data sources of relevance (corporate disclosures, agency surveys, academic research etc.), which can be partial and contradictory.
  • Organizing the publicly available data to document data center environmental impacts and support analysis requires specialized software tools and algorithms.
  • The Equinox platform supports the integration geospatial information (e.g., data center location and/or perimeter) with structured information such as reported metrics.

More broadly adopting an evolving portfolio perspective helps embed available data points in a coherent set: keeping historical data at hand, enabling scenario based analysis on the basis of new data center construction projections etc.

Compiling the European Union data center landscape

EuroDaCe aims to be a crowdsourced database of all significant1 data centers operating within the European Union, compiling in particular information relevant for environmental impact assessment.

The focus is the European data center landscape, and specifically data centers located in countries that are members of the European Union2. The database is still in its very first iterations. We have kick-started the development with a set of initial data sets sourced from OpenStreetMap (OSM). Specifically:

  • Fetching all OSM features that are annotated as data centers within EU countries.
  • Performing (preliminary) exploratory data analysis (available fields and frequency of use) and documenting data quality issues.
  • Mapping the OSM (crowdsourced) property data model to the Equinox data models.
  • Compilation of an augmented geospatial database in GeoJSON format which is exportable.

Next steps, how to get involved

Much work lies ahead and the success of the project hinges on crowdsourced contribution of high quality data points.

  • We aim to have a user-friendly interface available at sustainability.town to support the collection and processing of data.
  • Contributors may join (create and account) and adopt one or more data centers to document in more detail.
  • We plan further platform development to enable data storage and reporting.
  • You can get in touch in any of our online meeting points:

Download the latest database

The first version of the database is downloadable here in GeoJSON format. This is also displayed on this page.

Get EuroDaCe

  1. Significant primarily in a environmental impact sense, which broadly speaking is correlated with their overall digital services capacity and energy consumption. ↩︎

  2. Some data centers might be located outside geographical Europe in so-called overseas territories. ↩︎