Recycled water for Microsoft by Quincy

Millions of dollars are being spent by Quincy, Washington to build a system that will supply recycled water for huge data centers operated by Microsoft, Yahoo, Intuit and Sabey Corp. With this system, the city will be able to divert to gray water rather deplete its potable water. This project is very similar to the one in San Antonio, which was the key factor in Microsoft’s choice of cities for a $500 million data center. The Quincy project will be treating 5 million gallons of water everyday. The project is expected to cost around $9 million. The first phase will cost $4.5 million. Data centers use water to cool down. All the heat from the servers is managed through cooling towers where the hot waste water from the data centers is cooled with the heat being removed through evaporation. When this kind of process is done in a mega-data center, the amount of water used is unimaginable and sometimes exceed the entire city’s water requirements.