Tomorrow Water, and its parent company BKT, have signed a memorandum of understanding in Korea with Samsung, Dohwa Engineering, and BNZ Partners to develop eco-friendly integrated data centre and wastewater sanitation infrastructure solutions that hopes to improve quality of life, and help safeguard the environment for future generations.
This new collaborative partnership comes on the heels of Tomorrow Water’s partnership with Arcadis, a global design and consultancy firm that is conducting the techno-economic evaluation of the process and will develop the first Co-Flow projects in the U.S with Tomorrow Water.
Co-Flow integrates a wastewater treatment facility and a data centre on a single plot of land, linking the energy and fluid streams of both facilities to improve sustainability and economics. It is hoped that process intensification, coupled with an innovative water-cooling concept, will result in compact footprints, reduced potable water and energy use, along with reduced life cycle costs, while creating a highly attractive and sustainable solution for data centres in water stressed areas.
The use of Tomorrow Water’s innovative technologies enables these data centres to be built on top of underground wastewater treatment processes, further reducing footprint in direct response to land scarcity challenges resulting from rapid urbanisation over recent decades.
Co-Flow was developed as part of the company’s broader ‘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.
In 2018, BKT replaced and modernized the wastewater treatment facility at the Jungnang Water Recycling Center in Seoul. BKT’s Proteus primary wastewater treatment technology reduced the plant’s total footprint by 60 per cent (reducing the primary sedimentation footprint alone by 85 per cent) which turned a once fenced-in industrial facility into a community asset.
Demand for data centres exacerbated the lack of useable sites for data centre construction in urban centres. Given the fact that municipal governments around the world have been moving to upgrade or replace their sewage treatment infrastructure, Co-Flow aims to create a win-win scenario for data centre development companies, local governments, and their constituents.
