What does WUE mean?

WUE stands for Water Usage Effectiveness.

This is a measure of water usage, which is an important metric to track when utilising evaporative / adiabatic cooling technologies. WUE is expressed as litres of water used by data centre systems per kilowatt hour of energy used by client equipment (L/kWh).

WUE at Netwise

We began tracking WUE at our Netwise London East (NLE) facility in late 2024. Figures will be published once enough data has been collected.

We are also implementing a new water storage and feed control system as part of our Phase 3 development works, which will see further improvements to our score in 2025/26.

One way of effectively improving a WUE score is to raise the operating temperature of the data halls, which is a method being implemented by some of the world’s largest operators, including the likes of Equinix.

WUE is coupled with Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) for a more complete picture of the efficiency and environmental impact of a data centre.