by Brianna Crandall — March 29, 2013—New data center operators in Singapore now have more reason to go green with the official launch of the BCA-IDA Green Mark for New Data Centres program under the BCA Green Mark green building rating system. This new category is an addition to the BCA-IDA Green Mark Scheme first launched in October 2012. It was jointly developed by the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) and Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), with support from the Energy Research Institute@Nanyang Technological University (ERI@N) and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBLN) in the United States.
Reportedly the first of its kind in Asia, the BCA-IDA Green Mark for New Data Centres encourages new data centers to adopt energy-efficient design, technologies and systems in the planning and design phase. The program relies on energy modeling to assess the performance of a proposed data center design. Key criteria of assessment include energy efficiency, water efficiency, sustainable construction and management, indoor environment quality and other green features. The data centers are rated according to Green Mark Platinum, GoldPLUS, Gold or Certified ratings.
Abbott Laboratories Singapore is the first recipient of the new award. The data center was rated Green Mark Gold for its efforts to introduce efficient design strategies such as the use of modular design that optimizes performance through addressing phases in usage demand, the selection of energy-efficient information technology (IT) equipment, and the deployment of virtualization technology. When fully operational, the facility is expected to save more than oneg million kilowatt hours of energy annually, underlining how data centers can potentially realize significant cost savings by targeting energy efficiency in design, notes BCA.
Singapore’s total commercial data center capacity is forecast to rise by 51 percent to 336,900 sqm by 2015, from 222,829 sqm, according to a 2010 Broadgroup report. There are currently more than 50 data centers in Singapore, of which 20 are large data centers. A typical large data center in Singapore is estimated to consume energy equivalent to 10,000 households, which potentially offers significant cost savings for a Green Mark-certified data center. According to IDA, companies that achieve the highest rating under this Green Mark—Platinum—can potentially reap energy savings of at least 30 percent.
Three other data centers were also presented with the BCA-IDA Green Mark Awards for Existing Data Centres on March 25: Credit Suisse Asia Pacific Regional Data Centre (Platinum award), Equinix SG2 Data Centre (GoldPLUS award) and Singapore Tourism Board Data Centre (Gold award). These facilities, along with inaugural winner Abbott Laboratories Singapore, are the pioneer batch of data centers to be formally recognized under the program.
