Noord-Holland draws up data center strategy and gets a heat director – IT Pro – News

The province of Noord-Holland is the first province in the Netherlands to have drawn up a data center strategy. This includes the conditions under which new data centers may be built. As part of that strategy, the province appoints a heat director.

The strategy obliges municipalities where data centers want to establish themselves to make agreements with the province about, among other things, the integration of data centers into the landscape and how water and energy are used and how residual heat is used. Compliance with the points from the strategy must take place through licensing, supervision and enforcement.

The core idea behind the strategy is that the impact of data centers on the environment should be minimal, can be read in the strategy. That means they have CO₂– must run neutrally, that they use sustainable energy, and if possible generate their own, that residual heat is used and that the data center buildings are developed in a circular manner and that they fit well into the landscape. At the same time, the province must be an attractive location for establishing new data centers.

Regulate and Stimulate

The province is aware of the limited role they play in setting location requirements for new data centers. That means they want to do two things: regulate and encourage. As they say, they can mainly say something about spatial integration. “For example, by indicating where data centers can and cannot be located and by setting requirements for landscape integration.” The province has less say about water and electricity consumption and the use of residual heat. That is why the province does not want to act in a regulating, but stimulating way in this area, in order to persuade the market to build and operate sustainably.

In concrete terms, regulating data centers means that there are clear rules in the Environmental Ordinance about where data centers may be located. These are specific industrial areas in the Haarlemmermeer, Hollands Kroon and Amsterdam. No new data centers may be established outside this, including in municipalities where data centers are currently located, especially in Diemen and Haarlem. However, the province is working on a fourth ‘hyperconnectivity cluster’, in consultation with the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, the municipality of Hollands Kroon and the province of Flevoland. That is a new place where several data centers can be located outside the province of North Holland.

The province will also steer through licensing, supervision and enforcement, and establishment conditions will be drawn up together with municipalities in the field of space and sustainability. In addition, the province will make agreements with the data center sector about sustainability performance and wants to further stimulate sustainability and innovation. An important aspect of this is that the province wants more work to be done on using residual heat that is released when cooling the data centers. The province will appoint a ‘heat director’ to encourage the use of residual heat. That is a manager who has to ‘stimulate’ the use of residual heat at data centers in the region.

The strategy is initially intended for the next two years, up to and including 2024. The agreements of the strategy are laid down in the 2022 Environmental Ordinance of the province. However, a formal decision on the strategy has yet to be made. At the beginning of next year, the strategy will be presented to the Provincial Council. In the National Digitization Strategy, the cabinet calls on provinces and municipalities to come up with specific data center strategies. According to the province of Noord-Holland, the strategy is in line with the government’s digitization strategy ‘as much as possible’.

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