Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) measures the efficiency of a data center. PUE is a recognized standard that was developed by The Green Grid. A PUE of 1 would imply that all power is used on the servers alone, with nothing wasted and no additional energy consumed for cooling.
Where data center specific PUEs are available, Tailpipe uses these actual values. These may be published publicly or given to Tailpipe directly by the cloud provider (it should be noted that different cloud service providers may use different methodologies for calculating PUE). However, for some data centers, cloud providers do not make this information available. In these cases, Tailpipe uses a PUE of 1.15 for AWS data centers, and a PUE of 1.16 for Azure data centers, based on the global average PUE figures these cloud providers publish.
