This week I was fortunate to be invited to work with Jon Chorley and Rich Kroes from Oracle on a webinar discussing their new Environmental Accounting and Reporting modules for Oracle and JD Edwards. We selected this tool as the foundation of our internal emissions, waste generation, power generation, and water usage accounting processes. We discovered in filing our first Climate Registry baseline year assessment and our first American Pubic Transportation Association sustainability report that manually gathering this data is an intense and expensive process.

Thought I would share the slides I compiled for the webinar. We’ll be broadcasting next week, so I’ll post a link to that afterward.

This is a little off topic, but I thought I would share a presentation I did about my NCTD IT Team for a Leadership program I am in through the American Public Transportation Association.  This shows I am perhaps a little overly-proud of my team, but they do earn that respect.

Today the data center project paid off big time. Yes, for those in Southern California it was a near disaster- we had an extensive power outage that reached from Mexico to Los Angeles, and from San Diego to Arizona.

The good news for my team- the data center stayed up 100% of the time. In fact, we lost only 1 rail communications cabinet during 10 hours of an outage.

This means that our phones were up, even when cell phones were not. Our Internet was online and we could communicate with our customers. Our emergency operations center (EOC) was live and effective. I was proud to see NCTD keep bus and rail service in play hours into an outage that was so significant for the region.

More than anything, I know that without the data center project, we would not have achieved this success.

Not everything was smooth and I don’t want to overstate the positives… but I am confident without our green data center, our EOC team would have struggled that much more. So here is to investment in technology and the ability to see a ROI.

This week I was lucky to be able to participate in the American Public Transportation Association’s 2011 Sustainability Workshop.  This time the workshop really seemed to get its focus around sustainability initiatives that could work for every agency and business partner – not just the really large agencies.  It is always impressive to see what entities like New York MTA and San Francisco Muni can accomplish.  But this does not always translate well to the smaller guys.  And sustainability by its very nature will make greater progress if it is permeated through smaller agencies as well.

I started participating in this workshop just three short years ago.  In that time, the North County Transit District has gone from no sustainability initiatives, to a comprehensive portfolio of work – most of which has driven significant operating cost savings for the agency and lead to smarter decisions and business plans.

To me, sustainability is not a political movement.  It is not a badge of honor.  It is not a marketing campaign.  It is a means to ensure we can continue to deliver on our primary mandate as a company – to provide safe access for our community to their education, jobs, doctors, grocery stores…  It is a means to ensure that over the long run, NCTD can exist.  Good for the environment, good for our employees, and good for our community.

I am very excited to say that working with our consultant TrustElement, we were able to join the Climate Registry this week.  I struggled with this concept initially for NCTD: what taxapayer or ridership value would we bring to the table for making the investment in measuring and reporting emissions, waste, and water usage data to this nonprofit organization?

At the end of the day, the concepts of auditing, data quality, and transparency seemed important to our community.  It has become too easy to say one is engaging in projects that are “green” or “sustainable” without some independent validation of these statements.  The Climate Registry requires that all reporting entities be validated by an independent and certified third party.  This means that our communities and riders could have confidence that the data the NCTD is reporting is in fact accurate.  This to me seemed worth the investment.

There is a downside to all of this work; however.  I am afraid to say that our initial baseline year does not measure up well to other industry entities.  In transit, one important metric is the amount of carbon public transit offsets.  So for every ton of carbon generated by our agency in conducting operations, we in theory offset an amount by having our riders avoid independent emissions from their choice to ride our more efficient service rather than driving their own car.  In New York, the MTA is able to achieve an emissions factor of 12 – for every 1 ton of carbon, they offset 12 tons.  Chicago achieved 5 this year.  Philadelphia 3.  The industry average is 1.9.  Unfortunately, NCTD is 1.6 for calendar year 2009.

The good news is that this gives us a new set of targets and goals to achieve to improve this number.  As part of our plan, in 2010 we turned on the green data center, we started deploying solar installations, we installed emissions controls on a segment of the Breeze bus fleet, and in September 2010 we installed a driver feedback system on the buses called GreenRoads to try to improve gas mileage.

Regardless of the numbers we achieved in our baseline year, by measuring ourselves and by having that number audited and verified, our community can now see the progress we make and trust that the numbers are real.

I am happy to say that after many challenges, we were able to turn on the SPRINTER solar system today.This system was funded by the ARRA Transit Investments in Greenhouse Gas Reductions (TIGGER) grant.  It is approximately 225 kw, and should offset almost 30% of the power needs for the facility – which is a good thing as the SPRINTER Maintenance facility draws more power than any other site at NCTD.

This project ran into many complications, not the least of which was the need to repair the facility roof.  We could have made the decision to compromise on the quantity of panels at the facility, but I think we made the right choice to go ahead and fix a facility that is a mission-critical site for the agency.

We also faced the significant challenge of putting panels in an area that is designated as a bioswale for retention of water and prevention of nonpoint source pollution runoff.  In order to protect that purpose, we  had to replace the irrigation system and all of the vegetation with something more suitable to the new environmental conditions.  The added benefit is that is allows us to cut our water consumption by over 25% at the site.

I want to say a big thank you to Dan Harding and Seth Worden at Transit America, and to Josh Beeson at Martifer Solar.

This morning I was invited to give a presentation to the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce’s Sustainability Committee.  If you are interested, the presentation is located here.  It was a nice meeting with several questions from participants.  Was interesting to try to take a presentation about a data center and change it for people who do not have data centers on the fly.

Thanks to @ecostreaming (http://www.ecostreaming.com) for the invitation.  I am happy to say that I now represent NCTD on this committee, and I am looking forward to actively participating.

The LEED saga continues.  I’ve mentioned some of the challenges that we’ve faced, but today presented another interesting one.  I assumed because our purchasing specifications included statements like “systems that comply with the US EPA Energy Star requirements” that we would qualify for the Energy Star points on the LEED rating system.  Today, I learned how naive I am.  In fact, while several vendors have machines that in fact to have an EPA stamp of Energy Star compliance, they are few and far between right now.

Energy Star was a program started initially around residential power use.  As a result, most items that have the Energy Star seal are appliances or electronics in the consumer space.  A check of the EPA website shows fewer than 15 enterprise, server class machines that qualify for the rating.  So while many vendors state that they have Energy Star-compliant equipment, they do not in fact have too many machines that actually went through and successfully completed the process.

Let’s compare some from my data center as examples.  We run an HP shop (this is not an endorsement of their product or a sales pitch, just disclosure that we have them as an architectural standard).  So I have a wide variety of their equipment.  For our Microsoft Exchange upgrade, we installed Energy Star certified HP Proliant DL380 G6 rack-optimized servers.  These are currently the only series of HP machines that have the seal.  For most of my purchasing, however, I prefer HP BL460c G6 or HP BL680c G6 machines that slot into a blade chassis.  What is nice about blades is that they share components like power supplies and fans.  So this reduces the power pull, and reduces the amount of waste in the product.  So from a product life cycle perspective, they are a better choice. 

In spite of our choice to generally rely on the more energy-efficient and therefore more eco-friendly choice of the blade servers, we actually cannot claim the LEED energy star credit because these servers are merely “EnergyStar Compliant” instead of certified.  This is needless-t0-say an unfortunate outcome as we are inching closer to a possible Gold certification and any point that we miss now keeps us from that nearly impossible goal.

I’ve uploaded my APTA presentation about building a sustainable data center to slideshare if anyone is interested.  Clearly NCTD is a pioneer in the transit industry, even if building a sustainable data center is cliche in other industries.  Not one participant in the room had added sustainability as a design criteria when building their data centers.  We’ll see if I made any impression with the community on this issue.

Well today was an interesting meeting with our LEED consultant Brandon Smith.  Based on our meeting, it is clear that specific LEED requirements for data centers do not yet exist.  As a result, we’re pursuing a classification for an Interior Space (for reference, the requirements are here).  There are a few items from this list that simply do not apply to data centers, but are ‘gatekeepers’ that must be addressed in order for us to pursue any certification.

The first of these is that no part of the interior space up for LEED certification can be cooled by a CFC-based air handling system.  Unfortunately our building was constructed years before the non-CFC requirements came into practice and therefore the majority of the facility is in fact in violation of this requirement.  However, we had previously installed two CFC-free air conditioners dedicated for the data center.  Our original plan was to reuse these air conditioners to supplement the cooling in our board room; however, given the LEED requirements we are now going to use one air conditioner for the ambient air handling in the Data Center commercial space, and the other for the Board room.  Had we not possessed these air conditioning units, this would have been the end of pursuing LEED for us.

The second set of requirements that are unforeseen gatekeepers are those around reduction in water use.  Interestingly, we use absolutely no water in the data center as none of our equipment is water-cooled.  We made the mistaken assumption that no water use would be considered a good thing.  We were wrong.  As a result, we are now forced to add in the public shared spaces on the floor for consideration in the commercial space, and then to show not only a reduction down to the required baseline water usage, but then an incremental reduction from the baseline.

Again, this is an older facility, so we have older toilets and water fixtures.  So Mr. Smith is now working on the 5 toilets, 2 urinals, and 5 water faucets we will need to replace to be considered for certification.  I am wondering how the price will impact my overall return on investment calculation.  The cost for the LEED certification itself is approximately $15,000, and now the incremental cost of the water use reduction could be an additional $5,000.   I will refrain from discussing how this is a crappy situation.

To answer this question, I made the decision that logically we would want to spend no more than 1 advertising campaign would cost.  This would be the net cost – in other words, if the LEED portion of this project costs us $20,000 to go through the process, and if our average advertising campaign costs us $5000, then in order to have a $0 incremental cost the investments through LEED would need to save $15,000 through their total lifetime in order to justify the expenditure.  My logic here is that by successfully obtaining an LEED certification for a commercial interior space – the first such certification for NCTD, and for northern San Diego County – I would likely be generating some press and attention through the investment perhaps equivalent to one small marketing push.  The rest of the investment must be justified by some other tangible return.

Brandon and I are working on this question now.  Just for edification, here are the other items we’re considering in order to meet the basic LEED certification requirements:

• Designating some of our parking spaces for carpools or vanpools
• Reusing our interior door from the project instead of purchasing a new one
• Measuring the Solar Reflective Index of the concrete around the building
• Measuring the shade of the trees on the parking lot

To be fair, I understand the need to consider the overall building in this project.   Given that this is a ‘green data center’ that we are building inside of an existing and rather dated facility, the task of addressing all of the needs of LEED may be insurmountable.  Especially considering my desire to also establish the business case for the project beyond the tangible benefits of the data center itself.  In other words – building the case for green instead of conventional data center practice.

Once we have finished the complete ROI analysis, I will post.  Until then, dual flush or low flow?  That is the question…