The government of San Jose, California, a large Silicon Valley city whose government claims that one-third of all US venture capital is invested there, continues a strong push to attract data centers. Testament to that push is
Fortune Data Centers, whose facility acted as an impetus for the city’s deregulation of its permitting process for data center development.
In efforts to streamline the process for Fortune, the San Jose government eliminated a once-necessary high-level public hearing and lowered some of the conventional industrialdevelopment standards, according to the city’s economic development officer, Chris Burton.
At the same time, San Jose is trying to become a more sustainable city. Part of that effort is encouraging industrial customers to use recycled water.
RECYCLED WATER
The South Bay Water Recycling Division, an agency within the city’s Department of Environmental Services, delivers an average 10 million gallons of recycled water per day to San Jose, Milpitas and Santa Clara.
Commercial customers use this water for irrigation and toilet-flushing, and a handful use it to fill up the cooling towers in their facilities – something which the agency would like to see increase.
Most of these customers are power plants, such as Silicon Valley Power and Calpine, says Sim Ong, who works for the agency as an associate civil engineer.
His agency is actively working to convince data center operators to use recycled water instead of more expensive potable water in their cooling towers. “Most of them use drinking water and they use well water as back-up,” Ong says.
Depending on retail area, Silicon Valley companies pay $2.50–$3.71 for 100 cubic feet of treated drinking water. The cheapest water is in San Jose, and Milpitas water is at the high end of the range.
The cost of recycled water for industrial use is about 50% less across the board, but the price that data center operators pay suppliers is only part of their total water-related costs, and the financial advantage of recycled water remains questionable.
Equinix, which has three data centers in the agency’s coverage area, is one of the customers that is looking at using recycled water.
One of the Equinix facilities is one-quarter of a mile away from the agency’s recycled water pipeline, making it a good candidate in terms of the cost of building a new pipeline to connect it to the delivery system.
While the agency would like to see all data centers in its coverage area use recycled water, it recognises that, in many cases, building extra pipelines can be prohibitive.
If the Equinix deal goes through, the city would pay for the additional infrastructure with the funds it secured through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – also known as the stimulus package.
Negotiations are also in progress to convince Equinix to use recycled water in the new data center the company is building in San Jose. The plan to construct the 170,000 sq ft facility was announced in September.
The data center’s cooling system is expected to have a 4,000-tonne cooling capacity. So far, the company is planning to use potable water and ground water for back-up, and the agency is working to convince it to use recycled water instead.
Ernest Holloway, senior facilities operations manager for Equinix, is skeptical. “We’ve tried to use recycled water,” he says. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
Several Equinix facilities in Ashburn, Virginia, have been using recycled water and Holloway says the cost of extra chemical processes the water has to go through makes up for the money saved on its purchase price.
“What we’re seeing is that you have to use twice as much chemistry. It’s twice as cheap, but I can’t reuse it,” he adds.
“At the end of the day, what it costs to use recycled water is the same or more money than potable water,” he explains.
A WORTHWHILE ENDEAVOUR?
While agreeing that the cost benefit of recycled water to cool a data center is not there,
NetApp director of Site Operations, Ralph Renne, says it may make sense in terms of sustainability.
The company has investigated the practice and concluded it would not result in cost savings. Besides the extra operational expenditures, there is also a large additional capital cost.
“There is a significant cost that companies will incur trying to route non-potable water through their building,” Renne says. A large retrofit is required to separate potable water from recycled water.
Because of the possibility of using recycled water being a more environmentally friendly way to go, NetApp has not parted with the idea of implementing the practice.
“The reason we’re taking it on was really to take a look at it more for water conservation,” Renne says. “There really is no financial incentive in using recycled water. It’s just a sustainable practice.”
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This article first appeared in DatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine
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