Many people have been inquiring on the status of the LEED for data centers standard that began as a project funded by the California Energy Commission and managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. See http://hightech.lbl.gov/dc-epc.html for additional information on that effort.

Well the good news is that the US Green Building Council (www.usgbc.org) has embarked on a process that they call adaptation of the LEED standard 3.0. Simply put, under this process, credits are modified for a particular type of building that does not work well under the LEED standards due to the special nature of the occupancy, equipment, size, etc. This is a summary of the rules:

Credit Modification

• Changes are proposed based on the current balloted credit language


• The overall intent of credit cannot be altered


• Only 6 modifications can be made (regardless of the number of rating systems being addressed)


• 1 of the 6 modifications can be adoption of a “new” credit from another rating system


• Entirely new concepts/credits to LEED are not permitted


• No modifications are allowed to the minimum project and minimum eligibility requirements (though we will note issues for future deliberation/working groups)


• Proposed modifications must be approved by LEED Steering Committee


• Changing point values and weightings is not part of this effort

So we are working within the boundaries of the LEED standard for new construction, but are also looking to LEED for Commercial Interiors and LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance to determine the impacts and/or use credits from these standards that make sense for the New Construction standard.

We had our first meeting at the USGBC offices in Washington, DC last month. The team that is working on this effort is as follows:

• USGBC: four representatives


• Industry subject matter expert (liaison between working group and USGBC): Bill Kosik – HP


• Working group: eleven representatives from consulting engineering firms, data center owners, builders, equipment vendors and researchers

The preliminary timeline is to have draft language to the USGBC’s technical and steering committees by late spring 2010. It is not clear yet when a final standard would be made available and/or when pilot projects will be requested.

Here are some more analytics and data visualizations, this time on using outside air to cool a data center. When using this type of strategy, the hourly outside temperature and humidity conditions will drive the overall strategy and control of the HVAC systems. This is why it is critical to develop a very granular analysis of the climate for the particular site for the data center.

This is the base case (no economizer).

This is the case using economizer.

No we need to analyze the hourly kW demand of each case, by each sub-system. The following charts were generated from detailed, hourly energy use simulation algorithms developed by HP CFS engineers.

This is the base case. Notice that the blue line which represents the chiller power, is active all year.

This is the economizer case. Here you can see that the chiller power fluctuates much more, reducing the overall power consumption significantly. Notice also that the power for humidification (represented by the purple line) now becomes a larger contributor to the overall energy use. This is where the computer-based simulations become absolutely necessary so we can understand the entire picture before recommending a particular solution.

The FEDERAL LEADERSHIP IN ENVIRONMENTAL, ENERGY,AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE presidential order went into effect on October 5, 2009. The main goal of the order is to "to establish an integrated strategy towards sustainability in the Federal Government and to make reduction of greenhouse gas emissions a priority for Federal agencies". It requires that "the agency head shall consider reductions associated with: (i) reducing energy intensity in agency buildings; (ii) increasing agency use of renewable energy and implementing renewable energy generation projects on agency property".

There are 3-month and 8-month deadlines for the agencies to put targets and plans in place for reducing their carbon footprint. Could this finally be the push we need?

 On September 22, 2009, the EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson signed the rule on a new greenhouse gas emission reporting program which is a pre-cursor to potential carbon taxing policy. The reporting is for the top carbon emitters in the U.S, primarily from the manufacturing sector where carbon emissions are from the site (as opposed to indirect emissions from electrical generation). In this first round of reporting, automobile manufacturers and other large industrial facilities are not included.

If you read the documentation from the EPA you will see that the threshold for report is emissions of 25,000 metrics tons of CO_2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) annually. Furthermore, the EPA documents indicate that facilities with a minimum of 25,000 metric tons of CO_2e annual emissions account for 85% of the total GHG emissions in the U.S annually. Keep in mind that these are facilities that manufacture items that involve the use of CO₂ in the process and often times have on-site power generation facilities using solid or gaseous fuel located on site. These are considered direct emissions since they are from the actual site.

Since most data centers and other large commercial buildings do not typically have on-site electric generation facilities, the CO_2e emission from these facilities s are considered indirect emissions since they are attributable to electric generation at an off-site facility owned by another entity. The EPA has issued Technical Support Document on the Proposed Rule for Mandatory Greenhouse Gas Reporting which discusses the benefit of reporting indirect emissions attributable to a facility as a means to encourage awareness of energy use and as a way to understand the impact that the facilities have on the efficiency of the electric power generators.  While this is not part of the new reporting program, it gives insight into the longer-term plans of the U.S. EPA.

The indirect CO_2e   emissions from the generation of electricity for a data center is derived from the amount of electricity used expressed in kWH, the fuel source and efficiency of the generation. The eGrid documentation makes this calculation easy. If you know the annual electricity usage of the facility in kWH, just multiply this by the factors in the eGrid tables. These are expressed in pounds of CO₂ per megawatt-hour, so you will need to convert from pounds to metric tons and from kilowatt-hours (kWH) to megawatt-hours (MWH).  The average for the United States is approximately 1300 pounds of CO₂ per megawatt-hour of electricity generation.

Why is the relevant to data centers? How many metric tons of CO_2e does a data center emit anyway?  I did some cursory energy analysis to answer this question. Using the range of emission rates for U.S. electric generators, I modeled a data center located in Chicago, IL. I considered different size facilities : 2, 5, 10 and 20 MW.  The data in visualized in this graph:

The way this chart is read is the following:

1. On the X-axis, locate the data center capacity.

2. Draw a line straight up to the curve that best represents the CO₂ emission output (in pounds per kWH) of the electrical generator, state or NERC region based on where the data center facility is located.

3. Draw a horizontal line to the Y-axis from where the vertical line intersects the appropriate curve.

4. Read the value on the Y-axis where the line intersects.

So what does it all mean? Based on the analysis, data centers over 10 MW in capacity will likely face scrutiny in the future based on the indirect CO₂ emissions. However, as the generation type gets more CO₂ intensive, it becomes very difficult for facilities to achieve an upper limit threshold of 25,000 metric tons annually. Remember - I am making assumptions on the capping threshold and that corporations will need to report indirect emissions. But it is important to be prepared if this becomes the case.

CO_2e =  (EF_1* CO₂) + (EF_{2 *} NH₄)+ (EF_{2  *} N₂O)

where EF_i is the emission factor attributable to the particular gas. The US EPA publishes this information in their eGrid documents for all electrical power providers in the United States.

If you follow news related to the development of renewable energy technology, you’ll know that the United States is not keeping pace with other countries in research and development. And it is not just European countries but India and China as well. I don’t want to stray into the political realm, so I am looking at this purely from an engineering economics standpoint.

The level of not only research but actual implementation of solar and wind energy plants in other parts of the world is far beyond what we are currently seeing in the US. Even US-based companies are seeing more work coming from non-domestic customers, which is great for them, but it would be nice to see more from local energy companies. Not to say that there isn’t great work happening in the US on renewable energy technologies, but we do run the risk of being left behind in leading the green technology race. See the article below.

Silicon Valley status threatened in green energy Reuters, 9/11, Laura Isensee SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 10 (Reuters) – Silicon Valley has big ideas and deep pockets, but the iconic cradle of semiconductors and the Internet fears it may be pushed aside in the clean energy future. Other areas of the world, especially China, have quickly emerged as cleantech hubs thanks to their strong local markets and financing sources, company executives and venture capitalists said at the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit. Silicon Valley founded and funded the technology revolution and is home to companies from Apple Inc to Google. It may hold on to its leadership in innovation, but it will probably get a smaller part of the bounty. “We’ve now got four or five parts of the world that have seen the Silicon Valley movie and are basically saying cleantech is Silicon Valley redux and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let those guys win in this battle,” said Stephan Dolezalek, managing director at VantagePoint Venture Partners in San Bruno, California. Areas such as India, China and the Middle East are betting on the sector while in the United States, the industry is still struggling from a dearth of financing because of the credit crisis and waiting for more action from Washington on federal policies for renewable energy. Google Inc Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl said there was a “real danger” Silicon Valley and the United States in general would not lead the way in the space. “Other countries, China being one of the major examples, are investing very heavily in this space across the whole innovation pipeline…from shower to power, from the idea in the shower to generating the power (in a) commercial scale enterprise,” Weihl said. Certain elements of cleantech, such as semiconductors, may lend an advantage to Silicon Valley, but executives and venture capitalists expect various cleantech hubs to emerge across the map, each one specializing in a different component from LED light bulbs to smart grid technology to batteries. “There are so many categories. You’ll likely see category dominance that’s geographically so broad,” said John Woolard, chief executive of solar thermal company BrightSource Energy Inc. Already in Europe, Denmark is known as a wind center while China’s eastern province of Jiangsu has developed into a center for the solar power industry. Not surprisingly companies and venture capitalists are setting up business around the world, from U.S.-based solar panel maker First Solar Inc’s plans to build the world’s largest solar plant in China to privately-held BrightSource looking for partners in China and India. For the United States to really play in the cleantech game, more federal money is needed for research, development and demonstration projects, said Google’s Weihl, noting $10 billion to $30 billion a year would be a sustainable budget. Yet Silicon Valley’s spirit of entrepreneurship will probably protect its status to some degree, executives from China’s Suntech Power Holding Co Ltd and California-based SunPower Corp said. “I like to say there’s no place in the planet that you can get an idea and turn it into money faster than Silicon Valley,” said Tom Werner, chief executive of SunPower. Werner said the model that has evolved is that ideas and great companies come from Silicon Valley but manufactured elsewhere. “I think that model can thrive,” Werner added. (For summit blog: http://blogs.reuters.com/summits/)