The energy efficiency of data centers continues to be a critical factor in improving the overall energy use of IT equipment. In more and more new facilities, the energy from the data center is being reused in other parts of the facility or campus with beneficial results. These designs lack a metric with which can be tracked and compared. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is a base data center infrastructure metric, but it does not consider these alternate uses for the waste energy. To account for these, The Green Grid has proposed and defined a new metric: Energy Reuse Effectiveness, or ERE.

“A Metric for Measuring the Benefit of Reuse Energy from a Data Center,” was edited by Mike Patterson with Intel with contributions from Bill Tschudi, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Otto VanGeet, National Renewable Energy Laboratory; Jud Cooley, Oracle; and Dan Azevedo, Symantec.