Tomorrow Water has signed an agreement with design consultant Arcadis to develop Tomorrow's plan to build data centers at wastewater treatment plants.
Arcadis will evaluate Co-Flow, Tomorrow Water's proposal to put data centers on the same plot of land as wastewater plants, so the two can share water and energy streams, with the data center making use of treated water, and the water treatment plant using the data center's waste heat. After examining the patents, Arcadis plans to collaborate on potential projects in the US.
Tomorrow is a subsidiary of Korea's BKT, and says it has several companies with data centers interested, including Korean tech firm Samsung.
Reducing waste
Tomorrow Water says sewage and wastewater treatment plants could be made much smaller if large treatment tanks were replaced with its Proteus biofiltration system. These plants are usually in urban areas attractive for Edge data centers, which Tomorrow says could be located in the same site, where they can contribute waste heat to reduce the energy demands of the water treatment systems, by warming the biological systems and helping to dry sludge.
Tomorrow's parent BKT has built a wastewater recovery facility (WWRF) in Jungnang, Seoul, South Korea, which uses Tomorrow's Proteus biofiltration system instead of sedimentation tanks. Tomorrow Water is based in California, and has commissioned research that suggests that up to 1,500 water treatment plants in the US could usefully be co-located with data centers.
"Co-locating datacenters 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 said: "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."
our focus as of today is to complete the techno-economical evaluation to better position ourselves while approaching more partners and potential customers. We are working in both USA and Korea at different levels and in 2022 we plan to look further into doing a demo as well as starting the discussions with some Utilities who could be interested.
Update: In response to a message from DCD, Tomorrow Water VP Mohamed Abdelbadie said: "Our focus as of today is to complete the techno-economical evaluation to better position ourselves while approaching more partners and potential customers. We are working in both USA and Korea at different levels and in 2022 we plan to look further into doing a demo as well as starting the discussions with some utilities who could be interested."
