Engineered Systems - September 2008 - (Page 36)

We often think of the road to green and the road to LEED® as being one and the same. However, if your destination is a data center, mapping the current requirements reveals that the true green path may bypass this popular certification. BY KEVIN DICKENS, P.E., LEED® AP y first car was a ’70 Ford Fairlane. I bought it from a little old lady for $500 back when gas was $1.14 a gallon. It was a white four-door with a massive bench seat about the same size as my grandmother’s divan. It was no chick magnet (or maybe it was and I demagnetized it) but it was special because it was my first car. But an old lady’s sedan can only satisfy a 16-year-old boy for so long. So I sold it to a buddy of mine. My buddy proceeded to try to convert the white beast into a hot rod. He painted it competition orange, bought some fat tires, and jacked it up. But you know what? Underneath it all it was still an old woman’s car with an undersized V-8 and an automatic on the column. It was never going to be what he wanted it to be. To coin a phrase, he had merely put lipstick on a pig. Now the reason I take you down my memory fast lane is because in the last year or so, I have been approached by more than one IT enterprise wanting me to promise them a LEED® certified data center. In fact, LEED questions have, in many cases, trumped reliability queries in some interviews. And this concerns me. Because I have to tell you, that no matter what you do to green up a data center, it is still a pig … an energy hog to be precise … wearing a lovely shade of emerald lipstick. NOW STOP RIGHT THERE! “Dickens!” you might exclaim, “You green-washed hypocrite. You flipping flip-flopper. You moan for the last few years about sustainable design and now you jump the green ship just because it’s hard?” 36 En gi neer ed S y stem s September 2008 M Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that I am either bashing LEED or discouraging the greening of data centers, please take a seat. I am an advocate for LEED, and I encourage every designer to approach data centers like any other building: with a mindset to make it as energy efficient and sustainable as the program, budget, and mission will allow. In fact, it is even more important to maximize the efficiencies of data centers because their carbon footprint is so much larger than an office or commercial building with the same physical footprint. But the problem with buying into the conventional wisdom that a green data center must be LEED-certified is that greening the design does not necessarily ensure certification. And worse, too often the pursuit and eventual abandonment of LEED certification can become a distraction from the ultimate goal of doing the right thing by Mother Nature. There’s a good reason why, as I write this article, there are only two LEED NC-certified data centers out there. It isn’t because the design community lacks courage or vision, but rather because the laws of physics and the cold, hard checklist calculus just keep making it clear that you can’t get there from here. PAST IS NOT ALWAYS PROLOGUE Many may say that if it’s been done in the past, it can be done again. They are right, and someone may do it again. But since those two data centers were designed, the deck has been incrementally stacked against buildings with large process loads. The two data centers that have been certified were both certiti-

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Engineered Systems - September 2008

Engineered Systems - September 2008 Contents Editor's Note HVAC Challenge Back2Basics Case In Point Commissioning Building Automation HVACR Designer Tips Application Checklist LEED®, Or Get (It) Out Of The Way? BACnet Supplement Race To Market Steam Humidification In Pharmaceutical Facilities Outside Air, Inside Data Centers Forecast: Increasingly Cloudy And Under Control Products Computers & Software Literature Glossary Classifieds Advertiser Index Tomorrow's Environment

Engineered Systems - September 2008

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