by Shane Henson — August 29, 2011—GE Appliances & Lighting recently announced the opening of a new data center at its Louisville, Kentucky Appliance Park headquarters. According to GE officials, the company approached the design, construction and operation of this facility with the intent of reducing data center energy consumption and lowering environmental impact, while providing tremendous computing power to support major product and infrastructure investments now and well into the future.
GE’s data center is designed to perform 34% better in terms of energy savings than a typical code-compliant building. As if this were not enough, GE says it has done even more to make the data center a high-efficiency computing machine:
- In addition to installing innovative, high-efficiency cooling systems, GE is installing high-density servers to pack more computing power per square foot, reducing the size of the data center floor by half compared to the data center it replaces. This means that less energy is needed to cool the space.
- GE is reducing water consumption inside the building by 42% compared to the industry baseline by installing ultra-low-flow fixtures. Outside the building, GE is reducing water consumption by 100%.
- GE has offset 3% of the data center’s predicted annual energy consumption through the purchase of off-site renewable energy.
- GE is reducing water consumption inside the building by 42% compared to the industry baseline by installing ultra-low-flow fixtures. Outside the building, GE is reducing water consumption by 100%.
Facilities personnel working at the data center are a vital part of the team helping GE set the pace for energy management and sustainability. The measures listed above as well as other initiatives undertaken by GE’s facilities staff and other personnel helped the data center gain LEED Platinum certification, the highest recognition under the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.
Of all LEED-certified buildings globally, only six percent have achieved Platinum certification, and GE’s new facility is the first LEED-Platinum data center in the state of Kentucky. GE’s environmental achievement is made even more impressive considering data center emissions worldwide are growing faster than many other types of carbon emissions. In fact, a McKinsey & Company study estimates carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from data centers will quadruple to exceed emissions from the airline industry by 2020, due to the rapid growth in global demand for computing power.
