Uptime Institute highlights patchy reporting of water use by datacentre operators

In the meantime, operator efforts to drive down their PUE scores appear to have stalled in recent years, the research found, with Uptime attributing that trend to the number of legacy datacentres still in operation around the world.

“After large efficiency gains through the first half of the 2010s, average PUEs have remained relatively stable for the past five years or so,” the report stated.

“There is a clear explanation for this. Even as a growing number of new builds sport design PUEs of 1.3 or better, it is not economically or technically feasible for many operators to perform the major overhauls needed for much better efficiency in many older facilities.

“Across much of this large population of older datacentres, the easy gains from better airflow management, optimised controls and replacement of ageing equipment have already been achieved,” the report added.

Presently, it is less common for operators of smaller facilities to track their power use, but reporting of other performance metrics is decidedly patchy across the whole industry, the report suggested.  

“Most [operators] do not track server utilisation, arguably the most important factor in overall digital infrastructure efficiency,” the report stated. “Even fewer operators track emissions or the disposal of end-of-life equipment, which underscores the datacentre sector’s overall immaturity in adopting comprehensive sustainability practices.”

The report went on to state that just half of operators keep tabs on how much water their datacentres consume for cooling purposes. And the ones that do commonly only track it at on a site-by-site basis, rather than monitoring how much of this resource their entire datacentre portfolio uses.

When Uptime quizzed the operators that said they do not track their sites’ water usage habits, 63% said there was “no business justification” for doing so, while 23% said they lacked the technical capabilities needed to monitor how much water their sites use.

These admissions come at a time when the water usage habits of datacentres are coming under increased scrutiny by environmentalists and government policymakers on the back of predictions about how climate change and population growth is set to exacerbate water scarcity in drought-prone regions of the world.

This has prompted several members of the hyperscale cloud community (Microsoft, Google and Facebook) to set out plans to become “water-positive” entities by 2030 by committing to ensuring their global operations replenish more water than they consume by that date.

It is likely that other datacentre operators will be forced to follow suit in the years to come in response to regulatory pressure, said the Uptime report.

“A growing number of municipalities will permit new datacentre developments only if they are designed for minimal or near-zero direct water consumption,” the Uptime report stated. “These types of rules will heavily influence facility design and product choices in the future, mandating cooling equipment that uses water sparingly (or not at all).”