EUDCA's Technical Viewpoint - Data Centre Waste Heat and PUE Updates
This new paper from the European Data Centre Association (EUDCA) Technical Committee addresses a critical challenge in sustainable data centre operations - the conflict between heat reuse practices and the industry-standard metric for efficiency, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).
As the EU accelerates decarbonisation through policies like the Energy Efficiency Directive and the Renewable Energy Directive, reusing data centre waste heat via district heating and other networks offers a significant opportunity to reduce community-wide emissions. However, recent updates to ISO/IEC 30134-2 risk distorting the PUE metric by requiring data centres to include energy used for external heat recovery in their PUE calculations.
