The Netherlands has no shortage of electricity – but what it does lack is the grid to carry it. At the end of 2025, more than 15,000 applications from businesses and institutions were queuing for a new or heavier connection to the regional grids, according to the Dutch government. Wind and solar farms generate power in places where nobody uses it, while the cities and business parks that need it are stuck with a network that cannot take any more.
The sector often blamed for the grid pressure can in fact help relieve it, say Europe’s datacentre trade associations – not by using less electricity, but by using it where it is generated. Representatives from the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, France and Italy made that case during a panel at Vertiv Week 2026, the annual EMEA event of US power and cooling supplier Vertiv, in Zagreb.
Stijn Grove, managing director of the Dutch Data Center Association, explained how that would work. Offshore wind farms in the North Sea are struggling to expand because there is not enough demand for the power they produce. Without new buyers, there are no new power purchase agreements, and without those, there is no financing. The Dutch government’s last zero-subsidy tender, for the 1GW Nederwiek I-A site, drew no applications at all, with rising costs and lower electricity demand than expected cited as the reasons. And the power that is produced comes ashore on the coast, where hardly anyone needs it.
“So, now the grid operator has to rebuild its whole network to transport that power to a totally different location,” Grove said.
That is why TenneT, the Dutch national grid operator, is now asking the sector whether it can help at those coastal sites. The logic is straightforward – a datacentre next to a landing point uses the power on the spot. The grid operator no longer has to move it across the country, which frees up capacity on the existing network for other users. Grove added that the sector could bring more than demand alone. “We are a high-margin business, so we are willing to invest in this kind of situation to expand the grid.”
Ronan Kelly, CEO of Digital Infrastructure Ireland, sees the same pattern at home. Ireland has one of the highest numbers of datacentres per capita in the world, but the landing stations for offshore wind are not where those datacentres are. The Irish government’s Large Energy User Action Plan, published in January, aims to correct that mismatch by steering new datacentres towards locations with renewable generation.
Kelly also pointed to battery storage, which the Irish market increasingly uses to bridge dips in wind and solar output. And because datacentres already have backup capacity and can generate their own power, he believes they could support the grid when it is under strain. “There is a future role for datacentres in stabilising the grid,” Kelly said, “so that when it comes under pressure, the datacentres connected to it can help bridge part of the energy shortage.”
Heat as currency
Consuming power locally is one way datacentres can relieve the grid, and their waste heat is the other. In De Kwakel, a Dutch village in the middle of the Greenport Aalsmeer horticultural area, Switch Datacenters and dozens of growers signed an agreement for a heat network fed by a new datacentre. It will supply heat to the greenhouses, and the greenhouses will send cold return water back to cool the it. Research by Dutch regional grid operator Liander found that without it, every grower would need its own heat pump to move off gas, putting even more strain on a regional grid that is already congested and has little physical room to expand.
In Rotterdam, operator Smartdc runs a datacentre in the former logistics building of the Van Nelle Factory, a Unesco World Heritage site that is home to more than 100 companies, and supplies heat from its servers to the rest of the complex. The monumental buildings used around 800,000 cubic metres of gas a year. Since the datacentre replaced its conventional cooling units with heat pumps that carry server heat to the offices, their gas use has fallen by 80%.
Isabelle Kemlin, vice-chair of the Swedish Data Center Industry Association, pointed to comparable projects in Sweden: heat supplied to district heating networks, waste heat used to dry wood for local heating plants, and a datacentre in Boden that heats a greenhouse where the municipality provides jobs for people who find busy workplaces difficult.
“But that only works if municipalities sit down with the operator from the start,” Kemlin said, “not once the datacentre is already there.”
The European Commission (EC) estimates that reusing around half of all datacentre waste heat in Europe would cover the heating demand of four million households.
Nuance in the measurement
The day before the panel, the European Commission presented a rating scheme for datacentres. Much like the energy label on a washing machine, it will rate datacentres above 500kW on the energy and water use they already report under the Energy Efficiency Directive, with the first labels expected in 2027. The EC’s first report on energy efficiency puts the average Dutch datacentre at a power usage effectiveness (PUE), the standard measure of datacentre efficiency, of 1.17, which the EC rates as excellent, and a water usage effectiveness (WUE) of 0.70. Those figures rest on a narrow base, however: across the EU, only around 36% of the datacentres required to report actually did so.
Grove welcomed the initiative, but was quick to add a caveat: “The idea of monitoring and showing people how good your infrastructure is, that’s not a bad idea. But can you capture all those nuances in a small sticker with some data and some colours? I’m not really sure.”
Water is a case in point. Where water is plentiful, cooling with it is cheaper and more efficient than using electricity, Grove explained, while in water-scarce regions operators go fully electric. On paper that can look like poor performance, even though it is the right choice.
Michaël Reffay, managing director of France Datacenter, was more wholehearted in his support. “It increases transparency, and transparency means acceptability,” he said, although he warned that the scheme must not become a competitive disadvantage compared with the US and China.
Grove also pointed to a paradox that sums up the whole debate. A datacentre that supplies waste heat to its surroundings needs a heat pump to do so, and there is still no agreement on whether that extra electricity should count towards its PUE.
“If it does, the PUE gets worse,” Grove said, “but actually, you’re providing heat to somebody else.”
The label does take this into account, since it also records a datacentre’s contribution to the grid, including heat reuse. But once the labels appear, it is the letter that makes the headlines, not the small print.
The underlying data is also far from reliable. Researchers at the University of Stuttgart found in July that some of the figures supplied were plainly wrong: Danish datacentres, for instance, would have been running at 140% of their capacity, which is impossible.
Partner or burden
The panel closed on a note of urgency. Kelly described the current investment wave as the largest the world has ever seen. “We have the opportunity to build the most secure and the greenest AI infrastructure in the world,” he said. “But we have to grasp it quickly, because the industry won’t wait for us.”
The opportunity may be there, but the road is far from clear. Between sessions, Kelly acknowledged that working with grid operators can be hard going. In Ireland, where the grid operator is a state-owned company that grew out of the old combined grid builder and operator, it tends to work at its own pace and does not like being pushed, and offers of help from the sector often get a lukewarm reception. Nor do grids have capacity to spare.
Kelly, who worked in the UK for two years before joining DII, sees the same pressure there as the UK tries to capture as much of this investment as it can. “As soon as you open the doors and say, “Come here, we’ve got energy’, the developers arrive in 100-megawatt chunks. Before you know it, it’s all gone.”
Public perception is another obstacle, and one Kelly called “absolutely a problem”. Until there is demonstrable proof that datacentres do not harm their surroundings, he said, a negative image is hard to reverse.
For Reffay, the unease starts with AI itself: “Right now, AI is mostly delivering anxiety.” In his view, perception will only change once the technology delivers tangible benefits to large groups of people.
Kemlin went a step further and turned the argument around: Europe already has an electricity infrastructure, and is now building a second one. “It is not just another big consumer of electricity,” she said. “It is the new infrastructure.”
For Grove, it ultimately comes down to a political choice. “It’s good that we live in Europe, where there is regulation and there are boundaries on growth,” he said. “But the direction of our economy is digital. Europe, and the countries within it, need to make a decision to invest in the infrastructure the economy of the future needs.”