Google’s Floating Water and Wind Energy Retrofitted Data Center

This week, Ecoworldly celebrates the Water Week, and between September 8 - 14, readers of the blog will be reflecting on a lot of water issues here. But isn’t it exciting that this is also the week that word finally leaked out that Google was patenting a retrofitted floating water and wind energy data center.

What does that mean? According to documents filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office August 28, the Google water-powered data center will be - a system that includes a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units.

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The patent application says electrical and pumping power to run the data center may also come from devices powered directly by the wind like wind turbines mounted or tethered to an ocean floor and provided to receive prevailing winds for power to supplement the water-powered systems.

The data center will be directly wired to the turbines to help cool them because ocean water is insufficient for that purpose.

Google says this is how it will work: they will build the floating data center and maintain it by generating electrical power using the wave, tidal, or current motion of water adjacent to the facility.

Cooling for data center equipment will be done by circulating the adjacent water through a heat exchanger to produce maximized cooling effect.

Image credit: Edans at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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