The BREEAM family of environmental rating schemes for buildings has been extended to cover datacentres. The scheme has been adopted in partnership with the world's largest datacentre provider, Digital Realty Trust, for the design, construction and operation of its datacentres in the UK.

The growing interest in applying BREEAM to more specialist buildings has resulted in the latest BREEAM standard method for the assessment of data centres - facilities used to house computer systems and associated components such as telecommunications and storage systems. As these facilities have grown in number, the interest in applying BREEAM to assess their environmental impacts has also increased.  

BRE Global worked with the world's largest wholesale datacentre provider, Digital Realty Trust, during the development of this datacentre scheme. Now up and running the Data centre Scheme will be refined over the first 12 months of its operation, using feedback from actual assessments to inform any changes made.

One area that will be a focus for further development will be the means of assessing the environmental impacts of the data management processes themselves - in addition to those of the construction and operation of the datacentre buildings, for which the scheme already sets high standards. Experts in this area are being invited to participate in the further update and development of the scheme. 

BREEAM Datacentres falls within the family of schemes covered under the banner of BREEAM Other Buildings.  BREEAM Other Buildings provides a number of different options for assessing non-domestic buildings that fall outside the scope of the current standard UK BREEAM schemes.

BREEAM Datacentres assessments can only be carried out by licensed BREEAM Other Buildings assessors.

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electrical industry data centre news, electricaldigest.co.uk