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 centers with wastewater treatment plants.
Co-Flow works to integrate 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. Co-Flow’s process intensification, coupled with an innovative water-cooling concept, helps make more compact footprints, reduced potable water use, and reduced energy/life cycle costs. The process also enables data centers to be built on top of the existing treatment infrastructure, further reducing the footprint required for 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 datacenters and wastewater reclamation plants will help reduce wstewater 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,” said Anthony Dusovic, COO of Tomorrow Water. “Co-Flow's impact potential is quite high and supports the industry's need to make datacenters 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.
