The search giant is using water from local residents’ toilets and bathtubs to cool the systems in their Douglas County facility.
Google, Facebook,
Microsoft and other operators of massive data centers are always looking for
ways to make their facilities more energy-efficient, primarily to drive down
the skyrocketing costs of running these operations.
Another aim is to lessen the impact these data centers have
on the surrounding communities and their environments.
At Google's data center in Douglas County, Ga., the company
apparently is looking to be both fiscally and environmentally responsible. The
search giant is using water from the toilets and bathtubs of neighboring
communities to help cool the servers that are running inside the facility.
In a March 15 post in a Google blog, Jim Brown, Googles data
center facilities manager in Georgia, outlined a partnership the company has
with the local water and sewer agency that diverts recycled wateror what he
called reuse or grey waterto cool the systems. The data center was built
in 2007, and like other Google facilities, was using free cooling methods to
reduce the heat inside generated by the servers. Such methodsfrom water to
outside air-coolingare less expensive that traditional chillers used in many
data centers.
Googles Douglas County facility initially used the same
potable water that was used in the homes and businesses in surrounding
communities, according to Brown. And using a lot of ita typical Google data
center can consume hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day, he said.
With the evaporative cooling method employed in the data center, cold water is
brought into the facility, where its used to cool the hot air from the
servers. Some of it evaporates into the air via cooling towers, while the rest remains
as a liquid.
But we soon realized that the water we used didnt need to
be clean enough to drink, Brown wrote.
Google officials worked with the Douglasville-Douglas County
Water and Sewer Authorityor WSAto come up with an alternative. The result was
using recycled water rather than clean drinking water in the data center, he
said. The WSA runs a water treatment facility in Douglasville, where it cleans
and treats wastewater from local communities, and then releases it into the
Chattahoochee River.
Now, about 30 percent of the water is diverted from the WSA
system and instead is sent through a plant that Google built and paid for about
five miles away from its data center. Google now uses only recycled water to
cool its data center. After being used at the facility, any of the water that
doesnt evaporate into the air is sent to an effluent treatment plant on the
Google grounds, where its treated again to disinfect it and remove mineral
solids from it.
Then the treated water is sent into the Chattahoochee River.
The system not only enables Google to use the recycled water for cooling the
data center, but also protects the company in case of a drought, when
limitations often are put on the amount of clean water consumers and businesses
can use.
The system in Georgia, which was turned on in 2008, is
similar to one Google employs at a data center in Belgium, which relies on a
combination of recycled water and outside air for cooling.
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