BNY Mellon's Northpointe Data Center in Pennsylvania was awarded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Energy Star designation. Northpointe is one of the first data centers listed in the EPA's registry of more than 11,000 commercial properties to meet the energy-efficiency specifications.
BNY Mellon worked with Jones Lang LaSalle, H.F. Lenz and Mechanical Operations Company to reach a level of energy efficiency at the 71,000 square-foot data center built in 2006 that also helped reduce the company's operating costs and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with electrical use.
BNY says the team focused on utility improvements, implementing a variety of solutions so that the center's critical systems such as the power and cooling supply remained in synch with the workload.
In June, the EPA announced that businesses could apply for the Energy Star label for standalone data centers and buildings that house large data centers. To earn the label, data centers must be in the top 25 percent of their peers in energy efficiency according to EPA's energy performance scale from one to 100.
Only buildings that score a rating of 75 or higher on the rating scale as verified by engineers are eligible for the Energy Star, which indicates that BNY Mellon's Northpointe data center is more energy efficient than most data centers
In July, NetApp's data center at its technology center in Research Triangle Park (RTP), N.C., announced it was the first data center to meet the EPA's Energy Star for superior energy efficiency. The RTP data center achieved a score of 99.
According to BNY Mellon's 2009 CSR report, more than 61 percent of its owned and controlled properties portfolio by square footage now carries the Energy Star designation. In January 2010, the company announced a five-year investment in renewable energy equivalent to 225 million kWh annually, or 75 percent of BNY Mellon's U.S. electric utility use for the year.
BNY Mellon's recently retrofitted facility in Everett, Mass., cut its energy consumption by nearly 20 percent by implementing several sustainable building strategies including building-wide control systems, new operating methods and lighting automation. It also included the addition of a 76-kilowatt rooftop solar array that will reduce the office's CO2 emissions by about 50 tons annually.
