WP#35 - Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE): A Green Grid Data Center Sustainability Metric

01 March, 2011 | White Paper

Editor:
Michael Patterson, Intel

Contributors:
Dan Azevedo, Symantec
Christian Belady, Microsoft
Jack Pouchet, Emerson


The Green Grid has developed a new metric to complement the series of metrics it has introduced in the past few years, which includes Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Data Center Energy Productivity (DCeP), Energy Reuse Effectiveness (ERE), Data Center Compute Efficiency (DCcE), and others. The Green Grid proposes this new metric to address water usage in data centers, which is emerging as extremely important in the design, location, and operation of data centers in the future. The new water usage effectiveness (WUE) metric – combined with the PUE and Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) metrics – enables data center operators to quickly assess the water, energy, and carbon sustainability aspects of their data centers, compare the results, and determine if any energy efficiency and/or sustainability improvements need to be made. Since PUE has received broad adoption in the industry, the WUE metric is a natural extension of PUE and extends the family of xUE metrics.