Perhaps this is a case of “too much information,” and insert the joke of your choice here, but via Wired, Google realized that the water it uses to cool its data centers doesn’t have to be clean. In fact, it can be recycled water—and, in even more fact, obtained from a local sewage treatment plant. “‘When the residents of the county take showers and flush their toilets, they’re helping to cool our data center,’ Joe Kava, the man who runs Google’s data center operations and construction team, tells Wired.” I hasten to add that it’s not raw sewage they’re using at the Douglas County, Georgia, data center. Rather:

The Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority (WSA) operates a water treatment plant that, yes, scrubs sewer water from local houses and returns it to Georgia’s Chattahoochee River. But according to Google, the WSA is now diverting about 30 percent of that sewer water to a second treatment plant built and paid for by Google. After it’s cleaned at this second facility, the water is streamed to the company’s data center.

The water is then used run the data center’s evaporative cooling system. Basically, Google pushes hot air from its servers into the much cooler water, and most of this water is then evaporated into the Georgia air as it cascades down large cooling towers. Any remaining water is moved into another treatment plant, where Google disinfects it, removes various minerals, and returns it to the Chattahoochee.

An advantage to this is that is takes a great burden off the local fresh water supply. Let’s face it, in peak water-usage months, with drought conditions and water shortages a possibility, the thought of “wasting” potable water to cool a bunch of servers might not sit well with a lot of folks. (You can just imagine the kinds of things they would start Googling—which would just compound the problem.) Google uses a similar “found water” cooling system at their center in Belgium, where the water comes from a nearby industrial canal.

both efforts are part of larger movement toward “free cooling.” In using local water and outside air to cool data centers, 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.

However:

Google still operates some sort of electrical cooling system in the data center — the company won’t go into detail, reluctant to reveal its “secret sauce” — but this is only used on days when the sewer water [is] too hot to cool the machines.

Let’s hope that’s only a reference to the weather. Using wastewater for this purpose makes a great deal of sense—and it’s not like there will ever be a shortage of it. (I am reminded of a great line from the “flukeman” episode of The X Files, where a sewage treatment foreman tells Mulder, “560,000 people a day call my office on the porcelain telephone.” And there’s no sending it to voicemail.