eBay’s Green Data Center Lands LEED Gold
SOUTH JORDAN, UT — When eBay unveiled its “Project Topaz” green data center earlier this year, the company pointed out the many green features of the facility, and project that they would land LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out they were right.
In a blog post at the eBay Green Team website, eBay’s senior director of data center services, Dean Nelson, announced that yes indeed, Project Topaz is also Gold.
Nelson writes:
This month, the team got some great news – the U.S. Green Building Council awarded the facility the prestigious LEED® Gold certification, verified by the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI). Topaz becomes one of only a small handful of data centers on U.S. soil to achieve LEED Gold – a pretty major accomplishment considering the availability and security requirements needed to run eBay AND PayPal’s servers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Some of Topaz’s green features that helped pave the way for LEED certification include:
- The collection of rainwater to offset city water use
- The ability to use low outside air temperatures to reduce electrical costs for cooling our servers
- The use of low emitting materials throughout construction
- The use of over 20% recycled and regional building materials in the facility construction
- The use of a chemical free water treatment system
- Best practice heating ventilation design for office space comfort
The award comes two years after eBay’s first LEED Gold certification – which went to the “Mint” building at our San Jose North campus. The facility was the city of San Jose’s first LEED Gold building, still houses the city’s largest solar array, and now boasts five Bloom boxes that allow us to generate our own clean power 24/7. This year, we are also starting to experiment with renewable energy at our data centers, and installed a 100 kW array at a small data center in Denver, CO.
As we reported earlier this year, the data center has a PUE of 1.4, and incorporates all of the features listed above as well as using rainwater for irrigation and the data center’s water chillers, and using 400V power distribution throughout the facility so they can eliminate a whole layer of transformers and reducing energy use throughout.
eBay’s Topaz facility isn’t the first data center to get LEED certification, of course; this year IBM and Allstate both earned LEED Gold certification for their data centers, and a study published in April found that LEED-certified data centers save millions of dollars in energy costs over their lifetimes.
Read more at eBay’s green data center in Dean Nelson’s green team blog.