On Monday, wastewater utilities tech innovator Tomorrow Water announced a partnership with Dutch-headquartered design consultancy Arcadis to evaluate and develop Co-Flow, Tomorrow Water’s patented process for sustainably co-locating data centers with wastewater treatment plants.
Co-Flow integrates a wastewater treatment plant and a data center on a single plot of land, linking the energy and fluid streams of both facilities to improve sustainability and economics. Process intensification coupled with an innovative water-cooling concept results in compact footprints, reduced potable water use, energy and life cycle costs while creating a highly attractive and sustainable solution for data centers especially in water stressed areas. The technology also enables data centers to be built on top of the existing treatment infrastructure, further reducing the footprint required for the new data centers.
Arcadis, a global design and consultancy firm for natural and built assets, works with communities to design sustainable water solutions, data centers and other critical infrastructure. As part of the agreement, Arcadis will conduct a technical and economic evaluation of the Co-Flow concept and process patents. Once the evaluation is complete, Arcadis and Tomorrow Water will develop the first Co-Flow projects in the U.S.
“Co-locating data centers and wastewater reclamation plants will help reduce wastewater discharges, offset potable water demand and offer triple-bottom-line benefits to the water-stressed regions. We are excited to partner with Tomorrow Water to explore how the Co-Flow process may enable co-location projects that improve quality of life,” said Ufuk Erdal, senior vice president and water reuse director at Arcadis.
This is an exciting collaboration between two companies that are aligned by their purpose,” Tomorrow Water COO Anthony Dusovic said. “Reimagining efficiency models for vital infrastructure such as data centers and wastewater treatment plants is just one way we will contribute to safeguarding the environment for future generations. Co-Flow’s impact potential is quite high and supports the industry’s need to make data centers more sustainable. In fact, we are in discussion with several data center developers and owner/operators, such as Samsung, who owns/operates 17 data centers.”
Co-Flow is being developed as part of the company’s “Tomorrow Water Project,” an initiative to co-locate and interconnect infrastructure elements such as wastewater treatment, renewable energy generation, and data center capacity, capitalizing on their complementary energy, heat, nutrient, and water inputs and outputs to make them more sustainable and affordable to the global population.
In October, Tomorrow Water’s trademarked wastewater treatment technology Proteus was selected for a competitive pilot program by The Water Council of Wisconsin for demonstration in real-world conditions at a municipal facility in the Milwaukee area. Proteus is designed to increase the tolerance of wastewater treatment plants to “peak flow events” caused by rainstorms, ideally safeguarding plant performance faced with aging sewer systems and erratic weather patterns caused by climate change.
