Optimising Site Selection for Sustainable Data Centres

Across France and neighbouring regions, environmental expectations are evolving faster than any other project parameter. Municipalities are enforcing ambitious new objectives, regulations shift annually, and approval processes now scrutinise every element of a facility’s footprint. For data centre owners and operators already facing rising power demands, densification pressures and changing grid conditions, site selection has become as much an environmental challenge as a technical one.

 Regulations that Reshape the Physical Form

Local authorities have increasingly tightened regulations around renewable energy, building materials, biodiversity, and water usage – to the extent that these considerations strongly influence site selection before design even begins.

These requirements for site selection include 3 critical restrictions:

• Rooftop usage constraints: ambitious rooftop requirements such as solar panels and green roofs compete directly with traditional mechanical systems.
• Limited tolerance for derogations or waivers: authorities seldom permit exceptions, so compliance must be built into the design from the outset.
• Water-usage restrictions: though water-based cooling can optimise Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), municipalities often object to increased water consumption.
• Novel architectural solutions: designs may need to integrate green façades, passive cooling, and other eco-conscious features.

France’s RE2025 regulation illustrates how fundamentally sustainability expectations are redefining data centre design, even though process areas remain exempt for now. In practice, RE2025 drives decisions such as:

• Adopting timber structures for administrative and office zones to reduce embodied carbon
• Ensuring all office spaces benefit from daylight with no internal, windowless rooms
• Using recyclable materials and low-carbon concrete wherever feasible

These requirements demand extensive simulation, coordination between disciplines and the ability to anticipate regulatory evolution. Deerns multidisciplinary experts and deep understanding of client processes ensure that compliance informs key decisions from day one.

How Due Diligence Determines Feasibility

Due diligence has become one of the most decisive phases of development. A viable site today must align with environmental, infrastructural and social expectations that extend far beyond traditional technical criteria.

A comprehensive assessment examines 7 crucial factors:

• Grid stability and available utility power capacities
• Exposure to natural hazards including flooding and seismic activity
• Unfavourable site conditions such as high water tables and geotechnical constraints
• Climate suitability for free cooling
• Fibre availability and redundancy
• Acoustic risks when adjacent to residential areas
• Site-related hazards such as proximity to hazardous facilities and airports

Case Study – Averting Capex Waste

In a recent feasibility study conducted by Deerns for a brownfield site, unfavourable soil conditions and a high water table rendered structural foundations extremely costly, forcing the developer to abandon the site despite strong fundamentals elsewhere. Early due diligence insight prevented a far more expensive commitment down the line.

Investment to the Community:Project Catalyst

Municipal acceptance increasingly hinges on visible community benefit. In several recent feasibility studies for our clients, Deerns’ engineers proposed integrating waste heat recovery solutions to supply power to nearby residential buildings – a strategy that significantly improved how municipalities viewed the projects.

Together, these measures position the data centre as an active contributor to the urban ecosystem rather than an isolated, resource-intensive facility.

Incentives and Certification Pathways

Environmental certifications such as LEED and BREEAM have become central to how data centres position themselves in the market. Developers now target Gold or higher because certification has become a visible indicator of sustainability performance and a key expectation for investors, operators and municipalities. As a result, certification pathways influence feasibility from the moment Deerns assesses a site.

These frameworks shape far more than operational efficiency. They affect embodied-carbon limits, material selection, procurement strategy and waste-handling logistics. Deerns helps clients navigate these constraints early, aligning design decisions with both certification requirements and regulatory expectations.

National incentives further amplify these effects. France’s Certificats d’Économies d’Énergie (CEE) scheme rewards high-efficiency choices – such as 98%-efficient UPS systems or free-cooling chillers – with significant carbon-equivalency payments. For large campuses, these benefits can reach millions of Euros, meaningfully improving project viability.

By quantifying these incentives and integrating them into early engineering choices, Deerns ensures sustainable design becomes a financial advantage, not an added cost.

Why Integrated Expertise Matters More Than Ever

Success in this rapidly changing landscape depends on true multidisciplinary coordination. Sustainable site selection now requires the combined insight of MEP engineers, sustainability specialists, environmental modellers, acousticians, structural partners and regulatory experts. Deerns’ unique strength is its ability to integrate all these disciplines into a single, coherent due-diligence process, ensuring that technical, environmental and regulatory considerations are aligned from the very beginning.

This integration is reinforced by close collaboration across Deerns’ regional teams.

In this environment, sustainable site selection is no longer a step in the process; it is the foundation of resilient, future-ready data-centre development and a decisive competitive advantage in an increasingly demanding European market.