IBM announced that it has built a data center that will be twice as energy efficient as the industry average, according to officials with the company.

If that is true, it means the facility will have a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.25, as the industry average is 2.5 according to The Uptime Institute. That means for every 125 watts of power that enters the facility, 100 of it is being used to power IT equipment.

The Boulder, Colo. facility is the latest in a string of data centers IBM has at a campus there. This newest one is about 115,000 square feet, with about 70,000 square feet of raised floor. Including the new site, IBM’s Boulder campus includes 300,000 square feet of raised floor space, which makes it the company’s largest data center worldwide.

The facility will be used to host customer’s IT equipment. Joseph Dzaluk, the VP of infrastructure and resource management, said they already have 16 customers lined up. Some features of the new facility include:

• Construction started June 2007
• Submitted for LEED certification (first IBM data center to receive certification, if accepted)
• Free cooling for 75% of the year using a water-side economizer
• Will use about 1 million kilowatt hours per year of wind power purchased from Xcel Energy
• Variable-speed pumps and motors in the cooling systems
• Low-sulfur diesel in the backup generators to help reduce emissions
• Backup generators online in under 30 seconds
• Batteries provide 15 minutes of continuous power at full load (in case those backup generators don’t go online in under 30 seconds, I guess)