When I walked up to the mailbox this morning and saw the new ENR magazine with the cover showing the Best of the Best projects for 2011 (of which I was a judge), I felt like Navin R. Johnson when the new phonebook came out. You really do need to take a minute and watch the video below, you can’t possibly be too busy and you need the laugh.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOTDn2A7hcY

My thoughts were similar to Navin’s as I walked down the driveway and thought:

I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday. This is the kind of spontaneous publicity that makes people…things are going to start happening to me now.

But getting out of my weird brain and into the story, the ENR Editors selected the Facebook Data Center as the Editor’s Choice best project of 2012. It was Facebook’s first data center, LEED Gold certified and one of the most energy efficient data centers ever built. In keeping with the Facebook hacker tradition, all the facility CAD plans and specs are given away free to anyone.

They found substantial energy efficiency by custom building the servers, using only the needed components and not wasting energy on powering extra components found in off-the-shelf servers. They also used higher voltages in the facility, cutting out many stage transformers and the associated energy losses. Typical data centers lose 25% of their power in these conversions, but the Facebook facility was reduced to a 7% loss.

The facility also harvests rain water and captures and recycles the evaporative cooling water mist that didn’t get fully absorbed into the air. Lots of similar innovative design decisions made this an impressive project. I also liked that they had a transformer failure in their start-up and studied the situation with a milli-second by milli-second analysis to truly understand the cause.

But back to me, here’s my blurb from the Meet the Judges section:

Ned Pelger

PELGER

President

Pelger Engineering & Construction

Based in Lancaster County, Penn., Pelger managed design/build construction projects for 30 years, mostly factories, offices and apartment buildings. In the last five years, he developedConstructionKnowledge.net to mentor young contractors moving up the ranks or out the door to start their own firms. Pelger also authored Joyful Living: Build Yourself a Great Life!