SUBSEA HOW DATA CENTER FRAMEWORKS EUCOC AND EN 50600-5-1 COULD MAKE THE CABLE LANDING STATION MORE SUSTAINABLE BY CAMILA DE MORAES, IAGO BOJCZUK, AND NICOLE STAROSIELSKI
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able landing stations (CLSs) and data centers share very similar energy and operational requirements. Both facilities require continuous cooling, electrical redundancy, highly sensitive equipment, and very high availability targets. Both are mission-critical infrastructures on which most digital services depend today. A failure can cause outages with significant financial implications for clients and, ultimately, negative impacts on end-users. However, while there has been research and the development of sustainable standards and regulations for data centers over the past decade, very little is known about the CLS. Prior to the SubOptic Foundation’s Report on Best Practices in CLS Sustainability, there have been no industry-wide publications specifically on CLS sustainability. This is in part due to the general lack of information circulated about the CLS, as well as the significant variation between CLSs around the world. According to John Tibbles of the SubOptic Foundation, CLSs have been conceived in ways that fit “their local environment and onward domestic links, or with future subsea developments in mind.” He notes the difference between examples of facilities he knew: stations in New Jersey and Bermuda built in the 1960s that could withstand a nuclear attack were substantially different from a CLS in the United Kingdom that resembled
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a typical farmhouse. CLSs are less standardized than many contemporary data centers, and vary depending on coastal conditions, permitting frameworks, and commercial drivers. In recent years, data traffic, workloads, and the number of internet users continue to rise. As a result, sustainability has become a much more significant issue. According to the European Commission, since 2010, the number of internet users has more than doubled, and global traffic has increased 25-fold. Although rapid advances in energy efficiency have moderated growth in consumption, data centres and transmission networks each account for about 1–1.5% of global electricity use (IEA, 2024). This raises questions about the sus-
tainable future of CLS architecture and global distribution. In this column, we extend last month’s piece on the launch of the Report on Best Practices in CLS Sustainability and assess how sustainability considerations might be applied to CLS, especially as higher-capacity cable systems are deployed, new regions are connected, and new forms of convergence emerge. We suggest that relevant sets of standards, metrics, and best practices—already mature and widely tested across the data center sector—can be adapted and applied to CLSs. In particular, we explore how the EU Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres (EUCoC) and the European Technical Standard