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Advances, Systems and Applications

Table 9 Availability assessment of primary data item - data center power usage effectiveness (PUE) - required under the GHG Protocol for assessment of ICT emissions

From: Assessing the suitability of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for calculation of emissions from public cloud computing workloads

GHG Protocol Description

Data available to Cloud Vendor customers?

“defined as the ratio of overall power drawn by the data center facility, to the power delivered to the IT hardware. This is a data-center-specific metric and accounts for energy consumption of active cooling, power conditioning, lighting, and other critical data center infrastructure”

Partial – industry average PUE is 1.67 [65].

AWS does not report PUE data but has a website footnote that states their internal-data shows PUE under 1.2 [5].

GCP reports their quarterly and trailing twelve-month (TTM) PUE values for “large-scale Google Data Centers”. For Q4 2019 fleet-wide TTM PUE was 1.10 with campus specific TTM PUE ranging of 1.07–1.15 [29]. However, this does not include all GCP Regions e.g. London and Tokyo are available regions but do not have published PUE data.

Microsoft Azure does not report PUE data but states they “have met [their] goal of averaging 1.125 power usage effectiveness (PUE) for any new datacentre” [56].