Facebook's Prineville, Oregon, data center, which opened in April 2011, had a Power Usage Effectiveness PUE of 1.08 for the second quarter of 2011, compared to 1.07 in the first quarter1. For the first half of the year, this means 93% of the energy from the grid makes it into every Open Compute server. This PUE is much lower than the industry standard of 1.52.
The Green Grid developed a second metric, Water Usage Effectiveness WUE. WUE is a ratio of annual site water usage to IT equipment energy. We are committed to reporting WUE but are waiting to get results from new, more accurate instrumentation we are ready to implement solely for this purpose.
Footnotes:
1. The data center has a PUE of 1.077 in Q2, calculated as the average of measurements made every minute throughout the quarter; Q1 data of 1.073 was calculated at full load over an 8 hour period during the commissioning stage in December 2010.
2. The Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ENERGY STAR Program, August 2, 2007.