Engineered Systems - September 2008 - (Page 38)

LEED®? Or Get (It) Out Of The Way? fied under earlier versions of LEED NC. And while you may have seen some hyped up reports of a Platinum pre-certified data center from Advanced Data Centers in August, that was under the Commercial Spaces rating system (CS 2.0), which has very few points that actually relate to energy efficiency. Ken Brill of the Uptime Institute nailed it when he said, “It’s sort of irrelevant for a data center.”1 Under the earlier version of the standards, unregulated process loads such as those found in data centers were not included in the energy model. Also, you were allowed to subjectively assign building plug loads, computers, printers, etc., with no ties to the building’s total energy costs. What this meant for the modeler, and sub- Et he r L EW ne A t C N/ on LA ne N sequently the design team, is that the loads they had no control over (process and plug) were either eliminated entirely or could be minimized based on an individual’s interpretation of diversity. In turn, and quite logically, the designer was able to focus on those load components that he actually could address: envelope, lighting, HVAC, and water heating. The relevance of this is that now to get a nominal 35% reduction in energy costs, the designer had perhaps as much as 90% of the total regulated load to work with. More precisely, to get the 35% overall reductions, one only needed to get a 39% reduction in the 90% they could actually manipulate. 100% - (90% x 0.39) = 65% But all of that changed under NC 2.2 and 90.1-2004. First, the USGBC recognized that folks could game the plug load. The smaller the plug load, the larger the percentage of the total you had to work with, and the easier the targets were to hit. So they set the plug load floor at 25% percent of the total energy costs for the building. Now, for any building, data center or otherwise, the designer was left with only 75% of the total. So applying our previous 35% goal, the increases in efficiencies in the loads you could control jumped from 39% to 47%. 100% - (75% x 0.47) = 65% W N What happened 17 weeks ago on Tuesday at 12:36 PM? Vaisala HUMICAP® Humidity Transmitter will tell you. ct iv ity Vaisala HUMICAP® Humidity and Temperature Transmitter Series HMT330 And if that weren’t enough, now 90.12004 Appendix G (I think the “G” stands for “God help us!”), said that the process loads must be equal and in both models. Ouch. Let’s say you have a data center where the process load is actually 50% of the total (a relatively low percentage for a true data center). Now you have to cut envelope, HVAC, lighting, and DWH load by 70%! 100% - (50% x 0.70) = 65% You just turned the ratio upside down, my friend. THE BAR GOES EVEN HIGHER Then in 2007, the USGBC, in its quest to challenge the industry (a good thing overall), bumped the Energy and Atmosphere Minimum Energy Performance prerequisite from merely meeting ASHRAE 90.1 to beating it by 14%. (Quick note: Under V3.0 Call our experts or visit: www.vaisala.com/HMT330 Visit Vaisala www.vaisala.com Vaisala Inc. Tel. 1-888-VAISALA (824-7252) Fax 781-933-8029 instruments@vaisala.com Input 20 at www.esmagazine.com/instantproductinfo 38 En gi neer ed S y stem s September 2008 8/19/08 3:21:05 PM ESM09084Vaisala.indd 1 http://www.vaisala.com/HMT330 http://www.vaisala.com http://www.vaisala.com http://www.esmagazine.com/instantproductinfo

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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