Data Center Developer Commits to Green Goals

SAN FRANCISCO-One of the first LEED-certified data centers in the country is being developed in the East Bay city of Newark, CA. The developer is 365 Main Inc., a locally based provider of data center facilities to third parties that plans to have all of its new facilities certified under the LEED program created by the non-profit US Green Building Council.

Don’t expect the Newark facility to achieve a “silver” or “gold” LEED rating; datacenters are huge power suckers. The aggregate consumption by servers and data centers in the US has more than doubled since 2000 to about 45 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2005, accounting for about 1.2% of the country’s electricity consumption, roughly equal to the power drawn by the nation’s color televisions.

“We’re going for the initial base certification and, depending on that experience, we might move up the stack to silver or gold either in future builds or in Newark,” Miles Kelly, VP of corporate strategy for 365 Main, tells GlobeSt.com.