Placing an electronic device near water often seems like a questionable choice, but Google has shared its plans to change that perception. In many industries, seawater is often used to cool down facilities, but now, according to senior vice president Urs Hoelzle, Google will be the first to do so for large data centers that store and exchange information across the world.

With an increase in demand for added server capacity coming from diverse needs, such as banks and video-conferencing activities, it is axiomatic that the servers and date centers require a large amount of energy to operate. Google has been a front-runner in revolutionizing the industry's approach to energy efficiency. The new data center will be located on the coast of Finland and will be the most efficient facility out of Google?s five data centers. This innovation could become vital for companies seeking to cool down facilities with powerful and energy dependent servers.

According to the New York Times, a study conducted by Standard University found that "powering and cooling the equipment in data centers represented about 1 percent of total global electricity consumption in 2005, or about 0.3 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide". The researchers also stressed that, when assessing the technology industry's carbon footprint, one must consider viable alternatives. Although downloading music requires the transfer of information through servers in these facilities, their carbon footprint is still lower than the production, manufacture and shipping of CDs.

That being said, Google is clearly onto something; by cooling their data centers with bodies of water, Google is increasing its?in-house? efficiency, thereby substantially lowering their environmental footprint. In fact, Google has already put this practice into place in their facilities in Belgium. Google is able to clean canal water by pumping the water into coils in the data center over which warm air from the server passed. This exchange causes the water to absorb the warm air before it reaches the tower, after which some water is recycled whilst some evaporates.

In Finland, Google plans to use seawater sourced from the Gulf of Finland and diverted into a tunnel, which will then be used to cool down a set of pipes that run close to the servers and absorb their emitted heat. Moreover, Google is a big player in renewable energy investment, investing over $400 billion dollars, and plans to power its facilities with electricity from those environmentally friendly sources.