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Greg Weimholt, a construction veteran with 30 years of design and construction experience, has witnessed the evolution of the mission-critical sector.
Weimholt, the new one National Director of Data Centers and Mission Critical That’s because Canadian-based construction giant PCL, whose U.S. headquarters are in Denver, is leading the industry at a time when demand for data center work is high and companies are battling numerous problems at every turn – staff shortages, material shortages and equipment delays.
Here, Weimholt talks to Construction Dive about staying ahead of supply issues, maintaining a competitive edge and what draws workers to the company.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CONSTRUCTION DIVE: Many contractors are currently in the data center space. How does PCL maintain its competitive advantage?
GREG WEIMHOLT: We have probably been working in mission-critical areas for more than 20 years, but we are now focusing more specifically and intensely on making this group successful.
We have been around since 1906, so almost 120 years. We are a quality builder, a very technical contractor and the type of product suits us. That is the first component.
Greg Weimholt
Courtesy of PCL Construction
The second component is that we have more to offer than most other general contractors. Very few, if any, general contractors can offer the same services as we do in addition to building, and that includes nuclear power.
Our water division already works directly for hyperscalers in the eastern half and northern US, where they use water-cooled chillers or evaporative cooling instead of air-cooled chillers, which are more common in drier climates.
We have a very large solar group and a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), they manufacture battery systems.
It is a service that not everyone will accept because ultimately it depends on the cost, how quickly we can deliver and who is paying for it.
Talent is a big topic right now. How does PCL recruit and retain employees?
PCL is a 100% employee-owned company and that was a big reason I came here. I think it changes the way you perceive your work, its importance and your direction. From what I’ve experienced in my time here, there seems to be a much stronger commitment to success across the company.
I’ve worked at other general contractors and I feel like we’re all good people doing good work at the same time, but from an organizational perspective and given the size of the company, I think it’s a huge advantage. You feel that from brand new project engineers to people who have been with the company for over 30 years.
It’s significant that I think more than half of the people I’ve met have been with the company for over 15 years. That’s something you talk about with new potential candidates, whether they’re fresh out of college or coming from other companies.
I think they can feel it too, like I felt when I go to a construction site with the team. Everyone works as a fully integrated team. I think that’s something you can feel as a new employee in the company.
How is PCL dealing with supply chain and equipment issues and how are you mitigating these impacts?
Cloud computing has grown quite a bit over the last two years. This is the current reason for the supply chain problems: the significant growth in both cloud computing and artificial intelligence and everyone is trying to get ahead of the game.
It doesn’t matter how much money you pay. You tell one vendor to pay more, the other one pays a dollar more, and so it goes on and on. And the vendors themselves, the manufacturers, are struggling.
We actually talked about this at a recent data center conference, and both PayPal and Stack Infrastructure are currently evaluating a purchase.
It’s almost like a precast project where you reserve an eight-week production period. You don’t know what you’re building yet, but you reserve that production period in the precast plant.
What else are you thinking about at the moment?
Another point I made is that historically there has been no prototypical design-build procurement approach in the data center market.
The design-build approach is sometimes not particularly attractive to an owner because they want to make sure they are getting competitive pricing. However, the benefit of the design-build approach is that we can work with the design team and the owner to look at all the equipment up front, both owner-provided and contractor-provided.
We didn’t have too many problems with the main equipment on site. What we did have a problem with were the load banks.
You put the load banks on the data hall floor to test the PDUs, UPSs, and the chillers in the HVAC system. Once you install the busbars that run across the racks, it now takes 30, 40 weeks to get them installed, simply because there’s so much testing going on and so much construction going on in the data center that the load banks are critical.
Historically, this is not something we plan early on. It usually happens nine months after the project starts.
One of my advantages of design and subcontracting is that I produce a load bank plan that may not be what the client wants, but is very close to what the client wants, with minor changes.
I put the load bank plan together when we’re pursuing a project so we can get accurate pricing and tell the owner what we’re planning. If we need 10 more load banks or 10 fewer or whatever, we can present our plan at the beginning of the process, our customers will sign off on it and we’ll build in those changes.
