Thematic session: New frontiers in modern and efficient data centres
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Event background
In today’s context of energy market volatility and economic uncertainty, energy efficiency remains essential for affordability, energy security, and competitiveness. The 11th Annual Global Conference on Energy Efficiency will bring together global leaders to accelerate action, with data centres emerging as a key focus due to their rapidly growing electricity demand.
Data centres are critical infrastructure for digital and energy transitions, but their electricity use is rising quickly. The IEA estimates their electricity consumption was nearly 500 terawatt hours (TWh), or about 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2025, and will double by 2030. Ensuring efficient and flexible electricity use is therefore essential to balance data centre growth with grid resilience. This requires smarter design and operation of data centres, stronger integration with power and heat networks, and improved data and metrics to support business and policy decisions.
Stronger alignment among stakeholders is needed to unlock these opportunities. A shared understanding of priorities, such as how demand-side flexibility from data centres can support grids, or how waste heat can be integrated into district heating systems, will be essential. Where labelling schemes or regulatory approaches are being considered, appropriate efficiency metrics, monitoring practices, and transparency frameworks must also be developed.
The challenge for policy makers is therefore to ensure that the rapid growth of data centres is aligned with energy efficiency and system resilience objectives, while enabling these facilities to contribute to more flexible and integrated energy systems.
This thematic session provides a platform to explore how countries can develop the policies, metrics, and collaborative approaches needed to support sustainable data centre development, offering participants practical insights and opportunities to engage with key stakeholders on solutions to manage rapid demand growth.