Beyond PUE: A Local Impact Audit Framework for Data Center Environmental Accountability

Abstract

Standard data center sustainability metrics, including Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), and Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE), measure a facility's resource use and emissions intensity, normalized to IT energy use, without directly representing local resource scarcity, infrastructure capacity, or social footprint. This gap has become politically consequential. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, local opposition delayed or canceled roughly $130 billion in projects across the United States, driven overwhelmingly by recurring concerns over water use, power demand, infrastructure capacity, and transparency rather than internal efficiency, matching the total for all of 2025 [11]. We propose a five-category local impact audit framework covering efficiency, water stewardship, carbon and renewables, regulatory compliance, and local disclosure. The framework is designed for recurring quarterly assessment and independent verification against public records. We illustrate its application using publicly available data from three Illinois facilities that are currently at the center of local policy disputes, and we examine the data-access barriers that constrain independent verification. We position this framework as both a research contribution and a practical instrument for county-level policymakers evaluating data center permitting and moratorium decisions.