Data Center Water Usage Effectiveness

To water use in processes due to site operations and source energy generation similar to scope 1 and scope 2 greenhouse gas ghg emissions2.

Data center water usage effectiveness.

Wue water usage effectiveness is a metric developed by the green grid to help data centers measure how much water a facility uses for cooling and other building needs. The most frequent example of this happens when operators seeking to reduce power consumption switch from computer room air conditioning crac systems to evaporative cooling systems. Wue is still a fairly new sustainability metric a natural extension of pue power usage effectiveness the most used metric related to data center energy efficiency. Water usage effectiveness wue the metric for water usage in the data center is defined at a high level as.

Traditionally data centers have focused on power usage effectiveness pue to cool facilities however we re seeing water usage effectiveness wue become a critically important metric as. Where no water is used for cooling the wue has a value of 0. It equipment energy annual water usage wue 1. The units are liters kwh.

At most data centers there is a trade off between water and energy consumption. The units of wue are liters kilowatt hour l kwh. Wue is simply defined as annual site water usage divided by it energy usage. 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.

The wue is a metric that divides the annual water usage by the it power.