Platinum building tag for ITC data centre

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) recently announced that ITC Sankhya Data Center in Bengaluru is the very first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) v4 Platinum building in India, as represented in USGBC’s ongoing LEED Earth campaign. The campaign was launched in June 2013. 

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ITC Sankhya Data Center is also the first LEED v4 Platinum data center in the world. ITC is a $ 40 billion market cap multi-business conglomerate in India and a global exemplar in sustainability with LEED certification for all its premium luxury hotels, factories and even employee residences.

Designed to accelerate the uptake of green building and LEED in new and existing markets, LEED Earth is a USGBC campaign that offers free certification to the first LEED Platinum project in any country to certify using the newest version of LEED.  It also offers free certification to the first project to LEED certify in the more than 100 countries where LEED has yet to take root.

Data centers are unique projects as they have very few occupants, and they are huge energy users: a data center can use as much energy as a small town. Whereas a typical building is designed to meet heating and cooling needs for occupant comfort, a data center must provide massive cooling power for its servers. Water use is also a key target area for data centers, if the facility utilises water for cooling. These specific building needs are built in to the data center adaption for LEED. With the Indian data center infrastructure market expected to total $2 billion in 2016—a 5.2 percent increase from 2015—sustainably built data centers will be critical. 

To date, four countries have their first LEED v4 Platinum buildings: India, China, Mexico and Canada. The countries to have their first LEED certified building are: Burundi, Croatia, Ecuador, Honduras, Kuwait, Latvia, Luxembourg, Pakistan, Serbia, South Sudan, Ukraine, Tanzania, Bolivia, Lithuania, Dominican Republic, Kenya, Ghana, Myanmar and Venezuela —  and were among LEED Earth participants.