Proposed LEED^TM Criteria for Data Centers

The U.S. Green Building Council created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED^TM) rating system for homes and commercial buildings, and recently adopted versions for retail facilities, schools, and healthcare facilities. The California Energy Commission, Public Interest Energy Research program asked Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory develop a similar system for the construction of data centers for consideration by USGBC. Work on criteria for existing data centers will begin soon.

The project was led by Ray Pfeifer (SVLG) as a consultant to LBNL and William Tschudi (LBNL). The following industry groups: Green Grid, ASHRAE, 7x24 Exchange, Uptime Institute, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Critical Facilities Roundtable all participated in its development.

The following draft materials have been submitted to the U.S. Green Building Council for consideration.

• Draft - Environmental Performance Criteria Guide for New Data Centers. DRAFT based on LEED^TM NC 2.2 (MS Word) [download]
• Draft - Datacenter Environmental Performance Criteria: EPC for New Construction v2.2 rev.6: Proposed Registered Project Checklist (Excel) [download]

Please send comments to William Tschudi.

NOTE FOR DOWNLOADS:

Not all websites recognize the new Microsoft Office file formats for the second downloads (new Excel format is ".xlsx"), and some users are having problems with the downloads being misconstrued as .zip files (which it is not).

To avoid this problem:

1. When asked "Do you want to open or save this file? click "Save"
2. In the Save As window, click on the down arrow next to the "Save as type" field.
3. Select "All Files"
4. In the "File name" field, change the .zip to .xlsx
5. Click "Save"
6. Locate the downloaded file and change it's file extension back to .xlsx