QTS Richmond Data Center Gains LEED Gold Status

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One of the power rooms inside the QTS Richmond Data Center. (Photo: QTS)

QTS (Quality Technology Services) has achieved Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold Certification for Data Center 1 at the QTS Richmond Data Center. Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), LEED is an internationally-recognized green building certification system.

QTS has been retrofitting the 1.3 million square foot former semiconductor plant for data center use since the first customer installation was completed in November 2010. Since 2011, the company has recycled more than six million pounds of materials from its data centers, including copper, aluminum, steel, plastic and concrete, with the majority of those recoveries occurring in Richmond.

"It is an impressive achievement to attain LEED Gold in a facility that was not originally built to be a data center," said Rick Fedrizzi, President and CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council. "QTS’ engineering and data center operation teams, as well as its building and engineering contractors, should be justifiably proud of attaining LEED Gold with a broad array of energy efficient initiatives on the Richmond campus. Their hard work has led to the QTS Richmond Data Center being certified as one of the world’s greenest high-performance buildings."

QTS is taking advantage of existing infrastructure that includes 22,000 tons of chiller capacity on site, and a campus power capacity of 100 megawatts.

“QTS federal and enterprise customers are extremely interested in hosting their IT infrastructure in an energy efficient environment to be good stewards of resources and to reduce their energy consumption costs,” said Jim Reinhart, chief operating officer, development and operations at QTS.