Project Overview

TheOPM Headquarters building in DC houses administrative offices, conference rooms, an auditorium, a cafeteria, and a data center. The project expands upon the considerable progress made towards OPM’s sustainability and operational goals during two previous ESPC phases. The two completed phases have reduced utility costs by approximately $2.3MM and energy consumption by 37,670 MMBTU since Phase II was completed in 2020. In fact in FY2021, utility costs were ~$600k lower than originally projected, partially due to the automated occupancy controls that were implemented in the ESPC.

Expanding Project Impact

Based on OPM’s exemplary progress and the projected impact of this project, OPM has received $1.5MM in AFFECT grant funds for this project from the Department of Energy to support updates to the OPM HQ data center, improvements to site resilience, and implementation of a deep energy retrofit. This phase will further reduce utility and O&M costs by an additional ~$400k per year, bringing total savings to nearly $3MM. 

• Data Center Upgrades: The OPM HQ data center is a critical component of OPM’s IT infrastructure. Before this project, the data center operated with an elevated Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) that did not meet Federal CIO Goals. During project development, CEG worked closely with OPM CIO to understand their current and future operations. CEG developed a comprehensive project that includes (1) a new single-hot aisle arrangement to allow for better temperature control, (2) redundant air-cooled CRACs with variable speed operations, (3) a new high-efficiency UPS, and (4) a new Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV). Together, these improvements will offer operational, resiliency, and load reduction benefits, modernize the OPM HQ data center, and deliver a PUE of ~1.3. 

• Resilience Enhancements: OPM is responsible for several critical government functions. CEG identified data center emergency power as a key resiliency gap, and worked through the NREL Technical Resilience Navigator modules to assess resilience in a holistic manner and identify additional vulnerabilities. CEG then worked to develop innovative engineering solutions, including (1) removing water-cooled data center infrastructure to eliminate a single point of failure, reduce water consumption, and improve cooling efficiency, (2) replacing and right-sizing existing UPS and PDU units to remove aging equipment and improve part-load efficiency, and (3) replacing two aging generators that serve critical areas and consolidating emergency power systems onto one generator. 

Deep Energy Retrofit

In addition to the data center and resiliency upgrades, this project includes upgrades to the central cooling system, retrocommissioning measures, and replacement of existing solar PV systems. Altogether, this phase of the project will further the depth of the energy retrofit and reduce consumption by an additional 14% on top of the 52% electricity and 44% energy consumption reduction achieved by the first phases of the project and other OPM/GSA efforts between 2010-2019. For cooling, the data module employs dedicated computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units that can leverage outside air economization for the majority of hours per year.