Now Google has opened a new front on a less-noticed impact of data centers – water consumption. Like power plants, data centers, with their acres of servers, suck up millions of gallons of water a year for cooling (as an alternative to using electricity-hogging mechanical chillers).
On Thursday, Google said it had switched to using recycled water at its Douglas County, Ga., data center rather than continue to tap drinking water as it had when the facility opened in 2007.
“But we soon realized that the water we used didn’t need to be clean enough to drink,” Jim Brown, Google’s data center facilities manager, wrote in a blog post. “So we talked to the Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority (known locally as the WSA) about setting up a system that uses reuse water – also known as gray or recycled water – in our cooling infrastructure. With this system in place, we’re able to use recycled water for 100% of our cooling needs.”
Google built a “side stream facility” five miles from the data center that treats and diverts as much as 30% of the recycled water and send it to the data center to be used for evaporative cooling. What water remains is sent to Google’s own Effluent Treatment Plant where it is disinfected and cleaned before it flows into the Chattahoochee River.
“We care a tremendous amount about our management of our overall water footprint at Google,” Joe Kava, a senior director for data center construction and operations at Google, said in a video the search giant released about its water conservation efforts. “We don’t want to be taking fresh drinking water away from the local communities that we work in.”
Google did not reveal exactly how much water the Douglas County data center consumes but in an e-mail company spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz said, “It varies from day to day, but a typical data center of this size can use hundreds of thousands of gallons a day.”
Peter Frost, executive director of the Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority, said Google is saving taxpayer money as the local government now does not have to treat as much wastewater.
“That saves capacity for future homeowners as well as businesses,” he said in the video.