By Dominic Cutts
Director – System Solutions at Armstrong Fluid Technology
The HVAC industry is awash with acronyms but, if you are designing, installing or maintaining systems for datacenters, then the acronym that really matters is PUE. The PUE™ (Power usage effectiveness) metric provides a universal benchmark against which the environmental performance of every datacenter can be measured. It has been developed by The Green Grid Association (a non-profit, open industry consortium of end users, policy makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies) and carries significant weight within the datacenter community. Whilst the guidelines issued by Green Grid and others (such as the EU Code of Conduct on Datacenters' Energy Efficiency) are currently voluntary rather than mandatory, these initiatives for accreditation and benchmarking of environmental performance provide powerful commercial advantages for those datacenter operators able to differentiate themselves through investment in energy efficiency.



