The Fort Knox Directorate of Public Works will receive another award for its innovativeness with conserving energy.

RJ Dyrdek, the Fort Knox energy manager, said they will receive the Lab and Data Center award presented by the Federal Energy Management Program Nov. 2 in Washington, D.C. at the National Archives. He pointed out that the award is for improvements and performance of the installation's data center, which is located in Bldg. 4 of the Lt. Gen. Timothy J. Maude complex which houses U.S. Army Human Resources Command.

Dyrdek said data centers are measured on a scale of power use effectiveness and HRC's data center PUE was 1.38 last year, which almost ranks with the commercial entities like Google and Amazon. He added that when the data center opened in 2010, it was performing poorly and the PUE was 4.0. That changed in 2016 when the PUE went from roughly 1.6 to 1.38.

"The Army recommended all new data centers be built at least 1.4 and all existing data centers strive to get to 1.6 or below," explained Dyrdek. "We are already at 1.38 and we are doing real (well). This is the result of our energy project that used combined heat and power to create an absorption chiller, which makes the cold water from the air conditioning in HRC from the waste heat of the generator that's creating our electrical power."

He added that the generator is a natural gas generator that receives electricity from Fort Knox's natural gas. Dyrdek said the utility provider for the generator is Nolin Electric. Harshaw Trane runs the absorption chiller.

Using lithium bromide, the chiller makes cold water from the excess heat from the generator and that cold water runs the air conditioning system at the data center.

"In theory we are doing that for free and you don't have to put in any fuel to get our cold water," he said.

Dyrdek pointed out that the data center runs efficiently because a portion of the air conditioning runs from waste heat.

"As our data center grows and gets bigger we are going to have to create new means of producing energy consumption," Dyrdek said.

Chuck Beach, the Fort Knox resource efficiency manager, said HRC and the post is doing a good job of not wasting energy that's being used on the installation.

"You have to be doing something pretty special," said Beach, "and that special can be on our end where we are shoving energy into the system or their end where they are using less and less energy for the same work."