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Data Centre Power Usage Effectiveness



Environmental Ethics are at the core of our business, and one of the primary design aims of our Green Data Centre was to make it as energy-efficient as possible.

To calculate the efficiency of a Data Centre, to help identify areas where improvements can be made, The Green Energy Grid came up with the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric.

PUE is the ratio of Total Facility Power Consumption to the amount of power consumed by the IT Equipment.

PUE = Total Facility Power / IT Equipment Power

The Total Facility Power Consumption includes everything within the Facility, including Data Centre Cooling, Lighting and other power overheads.

The IT Equipment Power Consumption should only include the power that is used by the IT Equipment within the Data Centre. It should be taken as close to the IT Equipment as possible so that losses in cabling do not create inaccuracies in the PUE calculation.

Once you know the Total Facility Power, you divide this by the power used by the IT Equipment. In a perfect world, you would end up with a PUE of 1.0 where the IT Equipment uses all the power, but you will always get losses. The most significant energy loss is cooling of IT Equipment.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, most Data Centres have a PUE of 2.0 to 3.0.

Web Wiz Green Data Centre PUE

To calculate our Data Centre PUE, you would typically record power usage at the Utility Power Meter as it enters the Facility. As we generate our own renewable energy onsite, this would not represent our actual power usage. 

For the Total Facility Power, we measure the power usage at the Facilities Power Distribution Board that distributes power within our Facility.

For IT Equipment Power, we measure the power usage at the Sub Power Distribution Board within the Data Hall that distributes power to the Data Centre IT Equipment Racks.

Power usage changes depending on the season, as summer temperatures require more IT equipment cooling. We can use the PUE metric taken regularly at different times of the year to identify areas where we can improve efficiency.

Below you can see PUE results for our Green Data Centre during various periods, that we hope to improve on over time;

August 2018 - PUE 1.41
November 2018 - PUE 1.16
August 2019 - PUE 1.21
January 2020 - PUE 1.09
January 2021 - PUE 1.10
May 2021 - PUE 1.20
March 2022 - PUE 1.11
January 2023 - PUE 1.07
January 2024 - PUE 1.05



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