Green Data Center

I have asked USGBC/GBCI to respond to your question. This is still somewhat up in the air. A spreadsheet has been drafted to assist in creating a Baseline which has been used on some projects to date but to my knowledge it has not yet been made available publicly. All I can suggest is to contact USGBC/GBCI and request it.

90.1 does not cover the IT equipment just the space conditioning equipment.

Yes and I have even reviewed some of them. They had either defined an acceptable baseline for the IT equipment and claimed savings against it or the IT load was low relative to the total energy use to enable enough savings from the building systems.

I do not recall the percent savings awarded on those projects. But in general you are correct, the higher the process loads the harder it is to achieve large percent savings. If a high percent savings is desired then you have to address the process load (in this case the IT equipment).

Hi Marcus, I have a data center question related to but different from these. My client is considering eliminating a servers / large IT load from the project by moving to cloud computing. Can this be considered an ECM (i.e. a savings taken in the design model)? I have taken the savings for using more efficient process equipment, but not for equipment that doesn't exist (in our building) in the first place. My instinct is to set this part of the process load as the same in the design and baseline models. It will still help, but not as much as the ECM option. What's your take? (Please point me to a similar response already issued, if there is one. I didn't find any in my key word search.) Thanks.

This vaguely reminds me of the time a high profile firm which shall remain unnamed tried to get a LEED certification for convincing a client to not build a building...

Overall it is not an energy savings as you are just moving the load somewhere else. So I do not think it would qualify as an ECM. I think you can only claim savings against what is being installed in the project, not what might have been installed.

That's what I was thinking - thanks for confirming.