Dutch data center sector sent a letter to Minister Wiebes of Economic Affairs and Climate because of acute capacity problems in the power Infrastructure. This would hinder the growth of the economy.

The data centers, united in the Dutch Data Center Association, want the minister to draw up an emergency plan. “Make extra resources available for necessary expansions, solve flaws in the legislation, shorten permit procedures, put great effort into training and attracting sufficient technical personnel and do everything quickly”, says Stijn Grove , director of the DDA.

The computing centers, as large consumers of Electricity, are afraid that the electricity infrastructure of the Netherlands will not be able to cope with the future growth in consumption. This would jeopardize the Netherlands’ good position as a location for datacenters and affect the growth of the entire digital economy.

The problem would be big, especially around Amsterdam. “At Schiphol-Rijk, the power will be ‘on’ in the next four years, in Amsterdam Zuidoost and at the Science Park it is almost there: these three campuses are a hotspot as a location for data centers,” says Grove. Among others, Telegram and TransIP recently had problems with their services due to power failures in Amsterdam.

The DDA also thinks that the infrastructure needs to be adapted to switch to green power: “Otherwise, we will remain dependent on natural gas, coal and petrol for a long time, which does not seem a good thing for the Netherlands.” The large data centers of Microsoft and Google in the Netherlands involve their electricity partly from wind farms.