The Green Grid

**The Green Grid** is a non-profit industry consortium founded in 2007 to develop and promote energy- and resource-efficiency metrics for data centers. Its founding members included AMD, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and VMware; membership later broadened to operators, utilities, and equipment vendors. The consortium's most influential output is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), introduced in a 2007 white paper as a simple ratio of total facility energy to IT equipment energy. PUE was adopted across the industry within a few years and later codified as ISO/IEC 30134-2. The Green Grid subsequently introduced companion metrics including Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE), Energy Reuse Effectiveness (ERE), and the compute-oriented Server Compute Efficiency family. Most of these have followed PUE into the ISO/IEC 30134 series. Beyond metrics, The Green Grid publishes operational guidance such as recommended ASHRAE inlet-temperature envelopes for IT equipment, maturity models for data center sustainability, and frameworks for measuring IT productivity. In 2022 the organization merged into the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) but continues to operate under its original name as a standards-development body. Its work shaped the way operators, regulators, and customers compare data center efficiency, even as critics point out that infrastructure-only metrics like PUE do not capture the usefulness of computational work.