Tomorrow Water, an environmental solutions provider, has signed an agreement to collaborate with Arcadis to evaluate and develop Co-Flow, Tomorrow Water’s patented process for sustainably co-locating data centres within wastewater treatment plants.
Co-Flow integrates a wastewater treatment plant and a data centre 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 centres, especially in water-stressed areas. The technology also enables data centres to be built on top of the existing treatment infrastructure, further reducing the footprint required for the new data centres.
Arcadis, a global design and consultancy firm for natural and built assets, works with communities to design sustainable water solutions, data centres 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 centres 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.
Anthony Dusovic, COO of Tomorrow Water noted: “This is an exciting collaboration between two companies that are aligned by their purpose. Reimagining efficiency models for vital infrastructure such as data centres and wastewater treatment plants is just one way that 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 centres more sustainable. In fact, we are in discussion with several data centre developers and owner or operators, such as Samsung, who owns and operates 17 data centres.”
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 centre capacity, capitalising on their complementary energy, heat, nutrient, and water inputs and outputs to make them more sustainable and affordable to the global population.
