Announced Tuesday, the $100 million McClellan Park facility, being built on the former McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, California, is the industry's first and only data center to receive the highest pre-certification standard under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design system, a nationally accepted benchmark for designing, constructing and operating green buildings, according to ADC.

"At a time when data center energy demand is accelerating, we are significantly reducing energy usage and impact on the utility grid at the McClellan Park facility," ADC president Michael Cohen said in a statement. "We will continue to design environmentally responsible data centers and consider LEED as a baseline for our facilities going forward."
 
First announced in June, the McClellan Park data center is expected to have a Power Usage Effectiveness coefficient of 1.1, compared to the average data center typically ranging from 1.8 to 3.0. As a measure of data center energy efficiency, a 1.1 PUE reduces the energy required to operate the data center and lowers the total cost to the customer.
 
"The energy use of the ADC data center meets a recently considered impossible to achieve PUE of 1.1," Rumsey Engineers (rumseyengineers.com) president Peter Rumsey said in a statement. "With an energy savings of $1 million to $2 million per year this project stands to be the largest energy savings achieved ever in Sacramento and indeed the rest of California."

Among other environmental performance characteristics, the McClellan Park data center includes capturing all rainwater runoff from building; the use of shade and reflective materials to reduce heat; water recycling for landscaping, restrooms and cooling tower backup; and use of recycled, non-toxic and locally sourced materials. The pre-certification means that the facility is on its way to be one of the top environmentally-friendly data centers, however, it will be subject to a re-evaluation once completed to determine if its targets have been met.

As data center operators find that environmentally friendly construction not only makes sense for the environment, but is also cheaper in the long run, IBM announced in June it would be building a "green" data center in Canada. In May, Rackspace (rackspace.com) announced a new, carbon-neutral data center in the UK powered entirely by bio-mass, deriving its electricity from burning wood chips, waste paper and fiber fuel.