True Sustainability in Datacenter Selection

The market for datacenters is changing – as is the corresponding power consumption. However, conventional energy efficiency metrics are becoming less and less relevant because they do not take into account the biggest power guzzler in data centers: IT.

A guest article by SDEA president Babak Falsafi in "Kleine Kniffe".

As the backbone of our digital world, datacenters are at the forefront of the discussion on energy consumption and environmental sustainability. Increasing scrutiny by governments worldwide underscores the urgent need to address the environmental impact of these facilities: Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands (Amsterdam), and Singapore have enacted regulations or temporary moratoriums on the construction of new data centers due to concerns about energy consumption.

In its latest report, "Energy and AI," the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that global electricity consumption by datacenters will more than double by 2030 – from 415 TWh in 2024 to around 945 TWh. Artificial intelligence is the main driver of this development.

Why conventional efficiency metrics are failing

The annual survey by the Uptime Institute shows that the energy efficiency of datacenters worldwide has remained constant in recent years – measured by the conventional metric Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), which indicates the ratio of total energy consumed in a datacenter to the energy used by IT.

However, the PUE value has its limitations: it neglects various ways in which the overall energy flow in the datacenter can reduce emissions, e.g., waste heat recovery and renewable energies. But the most important limitation of the PUE value is that it is not meaningful when measuring IT efficiency.

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