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Greg Weimholt, a construction veteran with 30 years of design and construction experience, has seen the mission critical sector develop.
Weimholt, the new one national director of data centers and mission critical for Canadian-based construction giant PCL, with US headquarters in Denver, is leading the industry at a time when data center work is in high demand and a host of issues (staffing, bottlenecks material bottlenecks and equipment stoppages) plague companies at every moment. .
Here, Weimholt talks to Construction Dive about how to stay ahead of supply issues, how to maintain a competitive edge, and what attracts workers to the company.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Construction Immersion: Many contractors are in the data center space right now. How does PCL maintain its competitive edge?
GREG WEIMHOLT: We’ve been doing a critical mission for over 20 years, but now there’s a much more direct and improved approach to making this group a success.
We’ve been around since 1906, so almost 120 years. We are a high quality builder, a very technical builder and the type of product fits us. This is the first component.
Greg Weimholt
Courtesy of PCL Construction
The second component is that we have more to offer than the vast majority of other general contractors. Very few, if any, general contractors can provide all the same services that we can, in addition to constructing the building, and that includes nuclear.
Our water division already works directly for hyperscalers in the eastern half and northern part of the US, where they use water coolers or evaporative cooling, rather than air coolers, which are more common in drier climates.
We have a very large solar array and a battery energy storage system, BESS, they make battery plants.
It’s a service offering that, again, not everyone will accept because it all comes down to cost, how quickly we can deliver and who’s going to pay for it.
Talent is a big concern right now. How does PCL recruit and retain workers?
PCL is a 100% employee-owned company, and that was a big driver of why I came here. It changes your perception, I think, of your work and its meaning and your approach. From what I’ve found in my time here, there seems to be a much more defined commitment to success, if you will, throughout the organization.
I’ve been with other general contractors, and I think we’re all good groups of people at the time doing a good job, but from an organizational approach and an overall perception, with the size of the company that it is, I think it’s a great draw You hear it from new project engineers, to people who have been with the company for over 30 years.
It is significant that I would say more than half of the people I have met for more than 15 years have been with the company. It’s something you talk about with potential new candidates, whether they’re fresh out of college or coming from other companies.
I think they can feel it too, like me, when you go to a workplace with the team. Everyone works as a fully integrated team. So I think that’s something you can feel as a new hire in the company.
How does PCL deal with supply chain and equipment issues, and how do you mitigate these effects?
Cloud computing has been growing quite substantially in the last couple of years. That’s what’s driving supply chain issues now: the significant growth in both cloud computing and artificial intelligence and everyone trying to get ahead of it.
It doesn’t matter how much money you pay. You tell one seller you’ll pay more, the other will pay $1 more, and it goes on and on. And the vendors themselves, the manufacturers, are struggling.
We were actually talking about this at a recent data center conference, where it was both PayPal and Stack Infrastructure, they’re actually looking to buy.
It’s almost like a pre-made project, where you’ll book an eight-week production slot. What you’re building, you don’t know yet, but you’re reserving that production space in the prefab plant.
What else are you thinking about right now?
The other thing I’ve argued for: The data center market has historically not been a prototypical design-build procurement approach.
The design and build approach is sometimes not the most palatable for a homeowner, because they want to make sure they are priced competitively. But the advantage of the design-build approach is that we can start looking at all the equipment upfront, both owner-furnished and contractor-furnished, with the design team, with the owner.
We haven’t had too many issues with the main teams on site. What we have had problems with are the charging banks.
Set up load benches on the data room floor to test PDUs and UPSs and HVAC system chillers. If you have the busway installed that goes over the racks, it’s been 30 or 40 weeks now, just because there’s so much testing going on, there’s so much data center construction going on that the load banks are critical.
It’s not, historically, something that we had planned before. This is usually done nine months into the project.
One of the advantages of being on the design and outsourcing side is that I will actually come up with a load bank plan that may or may not be what the ordering agent wants, but it will be very close, with only small modifications .
I will draw up the load bank plan when we are doing a project so we can get accurate pricing and tell the owner what we are planning. If we need 10 more load banks or 10 less load banks, or whatever, early in the process, we can show our plan, our customers will bless it, and we’ll make those changes.
