WATER USAGE EFFECTIVENESS: A GREEN GRID DATA CENTER SUSTAINABILITY METRIC

[seanmcilroy29]

Executive Summary
The Green Grid (TGG) is a global consortium of companies, government agencies, and educational institutions
dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems. TGG 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.

While xUE metrics address various key energy and sustainability elements in the data center, The Green Grid
continues to drive the development of more advanced metrics such as data center productivity. To promote
these metrics and encourage greater data center energy efficiency for businesses, academia, and
governments around the world, The Green Grid will continue to publish white papers, technical briefs, books,
and articles, along with hosting tech forums that provide detailed guidance on using these metrics and
developing alliances with other organizations that promote a similar vision and goals.

WUE_v1.pdf