Google Is Using Sewage Water to Keep Its Servers Cool

Google is becoming increasingly creative with its data centers and we're not talking about the hardware, but the cooling systems. Google is trying to be as green and efficient as possible, but even the latest green technology can help you so much.

To get the best results, you have to rely on the local conditions at any data center. That's why it built a huge data center in Sweden which uses sea water to keep cool.

Now it's detailing how it uses recycled water, waste water that has been partially cleaned, to cool another data center in the US.

"A typical data center can use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day. When we first built the Georgia facility in 2007, the water we used came from the local potable (drinking) water supply," Google explained.

"But we soon realized that the water we used didn’t need to be clean enough to drink," it said.

"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 grey- or recycled water—in our cooling infrastructure," it added.

Google taps into about 30 percent of reuse water from the local treatment plant, pipes it through its data center and then diverts whatever doesn't evaporate in the process into another treatment plant it built specifically for this project.

There, the dirty water is cleaned up with disinfectants and by removing any mineral solids from it.

The water then goes back to the river cleaner. Not only is Google keeping its servers cool without using up precious drinking water supplies, it's also cleaning up 30 percent of the partially recycled water that would have otherwise made its way back into the river untreated.

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