Project Merit: Green Building

Arcadis (Amsterdam) and its U.S. planning, design and engineering subsidiary RTKL for designing and engineering eBay's $287 million Topaz data center in South Jordan, Utah. Opening in May 2010, the facility received a LEED Gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council in November. According to Arcadis, the data center, which processes roughly $2,000 in transactions every second for eBay.com and Paypal.com, is 50 percent less expensive to operate than the average eBay data center and 30 percent more efficient than the most efficient data center in the eBay portfolio. Key green and energy-efficient features include: cooling with a water-side economizer system supported by a 400,000 gallon rainwater cistern; using outside air to cool the data center for more than half the year; 400V power distribution, eliminating an entire level of transformers and saving 2% in power costs; in-row cooling units for close-coupled cooling; and a hot air containment system to isolate the hot and cold air within the server area.