Solar Cooling
for such a facility, I would recommend solar cooling. A good solar collector can heat up air and rock to around 90 C. That is enough to drive an ammonia cycle refrigeration system. The cold air can be re-heated with the waste heat from the ammonia system.
Basically, how this works is that water with ammonia is heated, and the ammonia is driven off. The, the water is cooled down to ambient temperature. The water and ammonia are then re-introduced. This is an endothermic reaction, and cools the water by quite a lot. The cold water is then circulated to cool the air. The now warmer water/ammonia mixture is then routed back to the hot end, and the process starts all over again.
This is how gas powered refrigerators work. It's an old process.
Still, what the Federal Building you looked at is doing is less expensive. There is a lot of equipment required for a solar based system. Solar also has severe corrosion problems in many areas.
Sometimes, the life cycle analysis gives the 'efficient' or 'green' solutions a much higher resource usage than just burning a little more fuel gives. It's a complicated question.
