Digital Realty’s Richardson, Texas Data Center Earns EPA’s ENERGY STAR® Certification

Digital Realty and LinkedIn have earned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) ENERGY STAR^® certification for the facility occupied by LinkedIn on Digital Realty’s data center campus in Richardson, Texas. This signifies that the building performs in the top 25 percent of similar facilities nationwide for energy efficiency and meets strict energy efficiency performance levels set by the EPA.

“Improving the energy efficiency of our nation’s buildings is critical to protecting our environment,” said Jean Lupinacci, chief of the ENERGY STAR Commercial & Industrial Branch. “From the boiler room to the board room, organizations are leading the way by making their buildings more efficient and earning EPA’s ENERGY STAR certification.”

Digital Realty constructed the data center in 2012 to leading standards for efficiency and reliability. LinkedIn operates the facility and has adopted numerous energy efficient best practices including airflow management, containment, LED lighting, real time data monitoring, proactive preventative maintenance plan and software automation to optimize facility energy performance.

“LinkedIn seeks to operate our data centers as efficiently as possible by ‘managing to the load’ or designing our data centers to run at optimal efficiency under a wide range of system demands,” said Kelly Shea Drewitt, Manager, Global Sustainability for Data Centers at LinkedIn. “Our Richardson data center operations team has consistently delivered high levels of performance, helping deliver on our strategy to make our data centers more sustainable.”

Commercial buildings that earn EPA’s ENERGY STAR certification use an average of 35 percent less energy than typical buildings and release 35 percent less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Digital Realty continues to improve its energy performance by managing energy strategically across the entire organization and by making cost-effective improvements to its buildings. Illustrating this effort, Digital Realty has reduced non-IT energy intensity by more than 17% across a 790,000 square foot portion of its portfolio compared to a 2013 baseline as part of the company’s commitment to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Challenge. EPA’s ENERGY STAR energy performance scale helps organizations assess how efficiently their buildings use energy relative to similar buildings nationwide. A building that scores a 75 or higher on EPA’s 1-100 scale may be eligible for ENERGY STAR certification. Commercial buildings that are eligible to earn the ENERGY STAR include offices, bank branches, data centers, financial centers, retail stores, courthouses, hospitals, hotels, K-12 schools, medical offices, supermarkets, dormitories, houses of worship, and warehouses.

ENERGY STAR was introduced by EPA in 1992 as a voluntary, market-based partnership to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through energy efficiency. Today, the ENERGY STAR label can be found on more than 65 different kinds of products, 1.4 million new homes, and 20,000 commercial buildings and industrial plants that meet strict energy-efficiency specifications set by the EPA. Over the past twenty years, American families and businesses have saved more than $230 billion on utility bills and prevented more than 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions with help from ENERGY STAR.

This certification builds on Digital Realty’s commitment to leadership in sustainable data center development and operations. Our innovation in data center performance and interconnected multi-cloud enablement is matched by our focused efforts to reduce our and our customers’ energy costs and carbon footprints, and we are very pleased to have had this recognized again by the EPA.

For more information about Digital Realty sustainability programs, please visit https://www.digitalrealty.com/data-center-solutions/sustainability/.