The pie chart above shows the typical power usage in data centres. The example illustrated above would have a calculated PUE of = 100/54 = 1.852

The lowest hanging fruit to reduce the PUE of a new data centre is reducing its cooling power use by capitalising on free cooling … if weather permits.

Let’s look at the Canberra weather data plot, we can conservatively estimate 90% of the time being able to capitalise on free cooling.



Based on this, if we reduce the cooling power requirement by half, and everything else remained the same; the resultant PUE will be = 82/54 = 1.519.

Assuming the data centre is 2,000kW, you will use 5,834,160kW/h less energy annually at a saving of $7ook per year (assuming $0.12 per kW/h) and a reduction of about 3,500 tons of carbon. Projecting these to 5 and 10 years, your total cost saving will be $3.5M and $7.0M respectively.

It really pays to be energy efficient and capitalise on net zero energy HVAC technology to improve your data centre ROI.

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