Power usage effectiveness
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Search complete. 23 mentions across 7 episodes found for "Power usage effectiveness".
Sep 30, 2026
Patricia De PauwGUEST
So that was all of the green building certification.
Patricia De PauwGUEST
And then the secondary main consideration was also PUE, so power usage effectiveness, which is essentially a measure of how efficiently a data center uses electricity.
Patricia De PauwGUEST
And I would say that those metrics, they still matter.
Patricia De PauwGUEST
But investors are increasingly wanting to understand really how a facility actually operates.
Patricia De PauwGUEST
And that's where green frameworks come in very handy, right? It's in terms of being able to provide a structure for communicating the projects more responsibly and then framing also your long-term infrastructure benefits.
Patricia De PauwGUEST
And so to your question then is, okay, so how can we utilize these frameworks more effectively? At Credit Agricole, we speak a lot with investors, have a very active dialogue, and there are four areas that repeatedly come up.
Patricia De PauwGUEST
The first is energy efficiency, PUE, what we previously discussed.
Patricia De PauwGUEST
The second is low carbon electricity.
Joseph MooneyGUEST
Completely.
Joseph MooneyGUEST
And again, on the data center side, and the reason I'm talking about the data centers, I'm going to an event next week and I have to do a bunch of learning, is that there's these two metrics called PUE and WUE.
Joseph MooneyGUEST
PUE is power use effectiveness in a data center.
Joseph MooneyGUEST
So how much of the energy you put into the data center converts to compute.
Joseph MooneyGUEST
And then the water use effectiveness is like, what's the annual water equivalent for the site? Okay.
Joseph MooneyGUEST
So there's people developing up these cooling techs to reduce PUE, reduce WUE.
Joseph MooneyGUEST
But there's an interesting thing being like, well, if we can convert our data center from evaporative cooling, which is a water intense process, to this thing called dry cooling, where you just have fins and you blow air over the fins as much as possible, that reduces your WUE, but it might add a tiny bit to your PUE.
Joseph MooneyGUEST
The thing is, a data center...
Karl JonesHOST
Always a good thing to do.
Karl JonesHOST
So power usage, sorry, power usage effectiveness or PUE, as I understand it, compares the total energy used by a data center with the energy delivered by its computing equipment.
Karl JonesHOST
Is, is PUE still a useful measure or can it give an incomplete picture maybe by overlooking aspects? such as carbon intensity, water demand, embodied impacts, and the value of the computing being
Chris LarryGUEST
performed? No, you're right about that.
Chris LarryGUEST
You know, PUE is just one measurement, and it is good measurement, and it's a, you know, it's a history-laden measurement that you can always, no matter what type of data center it is, you can use that measurement, and it's very universal.
Chris LarryGUEST
but it's not the only one.
Chris LarryGUEST
We actually have a WUE, which is water use effectiveness.
Cecilia HjertzellGUEST
So when I started at Tilo first, then I came from working with sustainability in IT more from an application side, working mainly with CIS and so on.
Cecilia HjertzellGUEST
And when I came into the data center and working with sustainability there as well, I was a little bit surprised of how much focus that was on for example, the metrics like PUE and other few metrics, but from my perspective, still not covering the whole ESG perspective.
Cecilia HjertzellGUEST
So, So this was something that was really into me.
Cecilia HjertzellGUEST
And then I met Johanna, who's been working with a sustainability director and doing the reporting for a number of data centers, but also for other actors within the industry.
8 MINS LATER
Cecilia HjertzellGUEST
Otherwise, they won't get access to the land spot.
Johanna FloodGUEST
Yeah, I think we, well, we as humans, but also data center operators, we have a tendency of looking at what's going on here and what's going on now.
Johanna FloodGUEST
So we have the operational metrics, the CO2 this month, this year, the energy use, the CUV, the PUE.
Johanna FloodGUEST
And we don't look into the future.
Artificial IntelligenceNARRATOR
52 in Uptime Institute's 2026 survey, recent builds routinely post 1.3 orbiter, and the biggest hyperscale fleets report numbers close to 1.1.
Artificial IntelligenceNARRATOR
But PUE measures how efficiently you reject heat.
Artificial IntelligenceNARRATOR
It has no term for whether the heat did anything useful after it left the rack.
Artificial IntelligenceNARRATOR
A facility can post a world-class PUE and still vent enough thermal energy every hour to warm a small town.
Artificial IntelligenceNARRATOR
By the only metric the industry tracks, that is a perfect score.
Artificial IntelligenceNARRATOR
Liquid cooling is changing the physics.
Kyle GrieveHOST
But I'd like to get back to the power consumption side of things.
Kyle GrieveHOST
So an important metric that I've seen mentioned for data centers is something called power usage effectiveness, or PUE.
Kyle GrieveHOST
It's a standard ratio that measures how energy efficient a data center is by comparing the total energy used by the whole facility to the energy used strictly by the IT equipment.
Kyle GrieveHOST
So in Google's case, it has a 1.09 PUE, and this is supposedly much lower than the industry average of around 1.3, meaning that Google is just basically running much more efficiently than the average data center is.
Kyle GrieveHOST
Now, it's great that Google is more efficient here, which gives them a number of scale advantages.
Kyle GrieveHOST
You know, these are advantages including cost savings, greater computing capacity per megawatt, and a reduced carbon footprint.
Kelsey MarklHOST
Okay, then how do we measure that? How do we know if we're creating efficiently cooled data centers?
Muzaffer AlbayrakGUEST
There are some parameters which are called PUE, power usage efficiency, and these values reflect how efficient the data center is structured.
Muzaffer AlbayrakGUEST
And especially for the AI data center, the target is to reach below 1.1.
Muzaffer AlbayrakGUEST
The PUE value is calculated in one relation in incoming energy related to the IT server energies, which has been consumed during the processing in the IT service.
Kelsey MarklHOST
Okay, so basically like everything you need to keep a data center up and running, including like, does that include lighting and like everything?
Muzaffer AlbayrakGUEST
It's correct.