Potential Changes for LEED Ratings?

Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (UGBC), LEED is an internationally recognized certification system that encourages sustainable green building and development practices by measuring areas such as energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emission reduction, etc. To many, this certification rating system has worked thus far for most building developments, but a recent article in Earth2Tech raises questions about whether or not the current rating system is also applicable for many of today’s data centers.

As referenced in Justin Moresco’s Earth2Tech article, the U.S. EPA estimates that data centers now account for 1.5 percent of the total U.S. electricity use and is suggested to more than double by 2011. Since LEED certification takes a broad approach to certifying the green credentials of a building, the difficulty comes into play with attempting to certify various architectural structures – commercial buildings, residential housing, data centers – all having different standards for what’s considered energy efficient. Current LEED standards don’t take into account special circumstances for computing power, Moresco argues. So with current standards, saying a data center is LEED certified doesn’t accurately reflect how energy efficient the building is, points out John Phelps, a VP of research at Gartner.

Data centers are still a small percentage of the overall real estate market, but with its anticipated rapid growth and business’ increased dependence on technology and computing, they shouldn’t be overlooked just yet. Brendan Ownes, the Green Building Council’s vice president of technical development for LEED, told Earth2Tech that they are considering tailoring existing LEED rating systems to better evaluate green data centers. Additionally, as part of that effort, the nonprofit organization is also evaluating which tools would best be used for making these evaluations.

The main effort here is that data centers are different from typical commercial buildings, and therefore need to be evaluated in a slightly different manner, and should have modifications made to the current certification system. If this happens, however, it will be interesting to see how the market reacts to these changes and see whether or not it will have a more positive or negative impact on data centers and the future of green building construction. 

Comments

[Everblue Training Institute]

This is a very interesting, and informative, article that you've posted here. Data centers are definitely becoming a hot topic in the LEED industry right now. It will certainly be interesting to see how the USGBC and GBCI handle the matter. I believe you are right that data centers do have different standards than commercial and residential buildings. I suppose we will have to wait and see what happens!