Most major Dutch data centres keep energy usage secret: report

Most data centres in the Netherlands do not make their environmental impact public, which conceals water and electricity usage, according to an investigation by Trouw and Lighthouse Reports.

The Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), which collects data on behalf of the EU, lists only 104 data centres but the industry body Dutch Datacenter Association (DDA) says there were 186 commercial data centres at the end of 2025.

These figures cover data centres with at least 500 kW of installed IT capacity, which are required to report their energy and water use, among other things, under the EU’s Energy Efficiency Directive.

The RVO’s list is missing almost half the centres counted by the DDA, and that count does not include the many data centres run in-house by banks, hospitals and other companies. Trouw estimates that public data is available for only around a quarter of large data centres.

Dutch data centre energy 
Data centres used 5.1 billion kWh of electricity in 2024, or 4.6% of the national total, according to statistics from CBS – a 37% rise on 2021. Figures for 2025 are not yet available.

RVO figures published this summer showed that Microsoft’s largest Dutch data centre alone uses 1% of national electricity, though the power is said to come from renewable sources. Google, which runs two large data centres in the Netherlands, does not publish its figures.

Grid operator TenneT expects data centres to account for 10% to 15% of Dutch electricity use by 2030. Water use is lower, at an estimated 0.1% of the national total.

Aarhus Convention 
Reporters working with Lighthouse Reports spent a year filing freedom of information requests in all 27 EU member states and with the European Commission. Most were refused, with some countries saying they did not have the data, and others citing commercial confidentiality.

The group has now filed a complaint under the Aarhus Convention, a treaty signed by the EU and all its member states that guarantees public access to environmental information. The complaint is before the convention’s compliance committee, which meets four times a year.

Lighthouse Reports says the Netherlands discloses more than most other EU countries, where reporters met what they called a “wall of silence”.