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Is it just me or have I missed something? I regularly see organisations proudly announcing that their latest data facility has been awarded LEED or BREAAM or 'other' building energy performance Certification. Very laudable in 99.99% of the worlds' new buildings (more or less all those that are not data-centres) I still don't understand how increasing the thermal insulation of a building whose primary goal is to remove it to the outside and dump it can be regarded as 'efficient'. In many environments I can envisage it taking more energy to transfer the waste heat if the building is thermally efficient. It brings up the sticky topic of energy re-use and the best example I have seen to date (best, not least, because it is on a multi-MW scale) is that of Equinix in the Netherlands. They are building a mega-centre next to a large university and in the summer they pump heat into the aquifer for the university to pump it back out in the winter - brilliant and brave, not least with CapEx. OK, I know that there are many other 'points' to the performance schemes, like grey-water use etc, that also can be applied to data-centres but the thermal rating of the walls & roof gets you most of the way to the medal table.