23 March 2026, DCpedia, Marco Verzijl

Article: PUE in data centers: useful indicator, but only valuable in the right context (machine translated from Dutch)

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is without a doubt the best-known efficiency metric in the data center industry. The simplicity of the metric has ensured that PUE is widely applied, cited and even used as a marketing tool. At the same time, that same simplicity is also the biggest pitfall. If you use PUE separately, without context or additional metrics, you can come to the wrong conclusions. In the worst case, incentives are even created that are at odds with actual energy savings.