The Dutch cabinet wants data centres to report their peak power and grid load, State Secretary Willemijn Aerdts told the Tweede Kamer, the lower house, in a letter dated 20 October, "because that is precisely where the bottlenecks are"1. The letter left three Party for the Animals motions of 24 September to the House's judgement, so the cabinet does not oppose them.
The motions ask the government to push Brussels for three things: a European ban on cooling with high-grade drinking water, mandatory EU reporting of energy, water and peak power that is public as far as possible, and binding performance standards. They point at the European Commission, whose consultation on minimum performance standards for data centres runs to 14 December. A legislative proposal is expected in the second quarter of 2027. the Commission adopted an A-to-G energy rating scheme for data centres in September; the motions ask Brussels to add water and peak power to what sites disclose.
By the letter's count, about 1 million cubic metres of drinking water a year cools Dutch data centres, about 0.088% of national drinking-water use. Computable reported that one planned Equinix campus in Amsterdam-Zuidoost would, at four towers, use 1.1 million cubic metres of water a year, without saying how much would be drinking water2. Under the EU's Energy Efficiency Directive, 104 Dutch sites with 500 kW or more of IT capacity already report, but the Commission publishes only aggregates.
