Quincy: Home to Several Data Centers, Works Toward Treatment Facility for Data Center Waste

The city of Quincy is working on completion of its Reuse Wastewater Central Facility, related to the waste from the data centers, with the goal to be operational by next summer. Quincy is home to several data centers and has the largest concentration of data centers on the West Coast.

"They all concentrated here because of the low cost power, because of the big fiber optic lines they can connect to, because of flat land not interrupted by weather or geological events," said Pat Haley, city administrator.

Most cities have two forms of wastewater, municipal waste and industrial waste. In Quincy, a third waste product which comes from cooling water from data centers.

"They (data centers) take water and use that cool air to blow into their data centers to cool down their equipment. They can cycle that water several times through their system," said Haley. "But eventually a good portion evaporates, as it evaporates, it concentrates minerals inside that water."

If this keeps recycling, it'll damage the cooling equipment so the data center blows that wastewater back down to the city. However, the city can't treat it the same as municipal or industrial. A specialized treatment process is needed to clean up the water from data centers.

"This is our system where they take that water, treat it and then reuse it back into cooling. So it forms a closed loop so it's never actually discharged into some type of waste disposal, like most wastewater goes into the river," said Haley.

Sabey, Microsoft and several other data centers clustered in Quincy.