In case you missed it the USGBC has announced a public comment period on their newly proposed LEED Rating System Draft, November 2010, BUILDING DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION. This document includes: New Construction & Major Renovations, Core & Shell, Schools, Retail, Data Centers, Warehouse & Distribution Centers, and Hospitality. Certainly an interesting mix of building design and use types as outside of university research buildings it is hard to imagine any of the others coming close in power density, infrastructure intensity, or requiring anything remotely similar to the availability demands of a data center.
The public comment period closes Friday January 14, 2011 at 11:59 AM Eastern. I strongly encourage anyone who may have an interest in pursuing a LEED rating for any data center, existing or planned, to download the document, review it, and submit your comments as quickly as possible for the phase-one review. There may be a future public review but without sufficient and well thought-out comment from the data center audience this draft may very well become the basis for the final release.
Not to create a huge call for alarm but this draft was developed without an awful lot of industry input. The USGBC was determined to keep non USGBC members, including organizations like The Green Grid and the Data Center Users’ Group, as removed from the development process as possible. So without giving away the top-ten major concerns let me strongly suggest that unlike Retail stores, Hospitality facilities, and Warehouse & Distribution Centers the Data Center has several unique properties, with perhaps the most significant being that the proper selection, deployment, and utilization of the IT equipment – the actual ‘work load’ – has a greater impact on the building’s energy utilization than all of the LEED rating points combined.
A simple review of the fundamental Energy Logic Actions demonstrates a 50% energy use savings regardless of the core building’s PUE or LEED rating. This is not the case for the related building use types.
Please, get involved in the specification development process. Yes, it may burn 88 pages of paper (176 pages printed 2-sided) to print the document for review but in the long run that is a small price to pay to help make LEED viable for data centers.
Comments and emails are always welcome.
