Two companies announce partnership on new “Co-Flow” project to boost data center and wastewater treatment plant sustainability.
Environmental solutions provider Tomorrow Water has signed an agreement to develop Co-Flow, Tomorrow Water’s patented wastewater treatment/data solution along with consultancy firm Arcadis.
As part of the agreement, Arcadis will construct a technical and economic evaluation of the Co-Flow concept as well as process patents. Once the evaluation is complete, Arcadis and Tomorrow Water will develop the first Co- Flow projects in the U.S.
Co-Flow integrates a wastewater treatment plant and a data center on a single area of land. Linking the energy and fluid streams of both facilities to improve sustainability and economics.
The Co-Flow process is designed to result in more compact facility footprints as well as reduced water use, energy, and life cycle costs. This makes it a highly attractive and sustainable solution for data centers to be built on top of the existing treatment infrastructure, further reducing the carbon footprint required for the new data centers to run and function successfully.
“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,” said Anthony Dusovic, COO of Tomorrow Water. “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 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”, which is an initiative to co-locate and interconnect infrastructural elements such as wastewater treatment, renewable energy generation, and data center capacity which capitalises on the their energy, heat and nutrient and water inputs and outputs to make them more sustainable and affordable to the global population.
