Microsoft receives cooling water

QUINCY — Quincy’s Microsoft Data Center received its first batch of reclaimed water this week.

The city started pumping water to the data center as part of the first phase of the reclaimed wastewater project. The project sends water from the municipal wastewater plant to be used in cooling the data center.

The water is presently flowing into a evaporation pond, City Administrator Tim Snead said the data center is working on hooking up the cooling towers to the line.

“You always run into a few bugs and they’re working on them,” he said. “Hopefully Microsoft will get them all hooked up in the near future … Once we turned the water on, it took three hours just to get it around to Microsoft. It gives you an idea of how long it takes to fill the pipes up. Our big day was seeing water come out the end of that pipe.”

The $4.6 million the city received from the state’s capital budget and the county commissioners covered the first phase, the beginning of the third phase and some additional pipe.

Gray and Osborne engineers estimated the first section of the project would cost $3.7 million, the lowest bidder was MRM Construction of Ellensburg, Wash.

The second phase will continue taking water to the Intuit and Yahoo! data centers.

A third phase connects the industrial wastewater facility to the system.

Several years ago, Quincy built a waste water treatment plant for food processors, Mayor Jim Hemberry said during the groundbreaking of the project’s first phase in August. The plant is nearing its capacity of 3.25 million gallons a day.

“Interestingly, data centers, like food processors, require significant quantities of water,” he said. “This water is used to keep the numerous servers cold and cooled by evaporating water in cooling towers.”

If the city didn’t complete the project, he said they would need to purchase more water rights, which are expensive and difficult to obtain.

The city also received a $100,000 loan from the Strategic Infrastructure Program. The state-funded program gives money to help economic development in the county. The money will be used  for a Water Reclamation and Industrial Reuse Comprehensive Plan.

With the reclaimed water project running, Snead said the city needs to update its water comprehensive plan because the cooling systems will be running on reclaimed water rather than well water.