Google uses sewer water to cool data centre

Google has announced the first reuse water system at one of its US data centres, pairing with a local water and sewer authority on the venture involving its Douglas County centre, The Brisbane Times reports.

Google says the system is financed by the Internet search giant and owned by Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority. It is designed to help keep the Chattahoochee River clean and conserve water in Georgia.

“We care a tremendous amount about our management of our overall water footprint at Google,” Forbes quotes Joe Kava, a senior director for data centre construction and operations at Google, as saying.

“We don't want to be taking fresh drinking water away from the local communities that we work in.”

According to Wired, Google uses a similar system at its data centre in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, where it reuses water from a nearby industrial canal, and both efforts are part of a larger movement towards “free cooling”.

In using local water and outside air to cool data centres, companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft can reduce their dependency on power-hungry mechanical chillers. Like Google, these companies say they do this to reduce the damage that their massive computing facilities do to the planet.