KaiSo · Tenerife
Untreated wastewater is putting growing pressure on Tenerife's coasts — and with them the island's most important economic area. That is exactly where KaiSo starts, with waste heat from servers driving the treatment.
System developer: KaiSo · KaiSo.works UG
YOU ARE READING THIS AS —
IN MOTION
The film only starts when you click it, and stays silent until then. For now the film is in German — both the on-screen text and the narration. The English version follows.
THE ISLAND'S PROBLEM
On a volcanic island, what a data centre throws off is scarce: energy, water, fertile soil. The most urgent of all, though, is what flows back — municipal wastewater that reaches the sea through existing outfalls.
PRIMARY · MUNICIPAL WASTEWATER
Every day, untreated wastewater flows into the sea through existing pipes. This is not a distant environmental issue: it affects the beaches and with them the economic foundation of the island.
The waste heat from the servers is warm enough to treat this wastewater — without drawing electricity from the island grid to do it. The hub connects for this as a decentralised offtaker directly to the existing sewer network or pumping station.
SEPARATE FROM THAT · DRINKING WATER FROM THE SEA
The two figures below describe the existing drinking water supply of the Canary Islands. They do not belong to the wastewater, and they do not describe the capacity of this plant.
The Canary Islands run around 28 large desalination plants with roughly 550,000 cubic metres a day. On Fuerteventura, practically all drinking water comes from seawater desalination.
The same plant can treat seawater just as well. For Tenerife that is the secondary line — the focus is on the wastewater.
Older plants in the Canary Islands need 4 to 4.5 kilowatt hours of electricity for one cubic metre — from a fossil-fuelled island grid.
That is why, in the Canary Islands, water is always an energy question too.
FURTHER BOTTLENECKS ON THE ISLAND
On an island, electricity is the bottleneck behind the water. Every additional treatment hangs on the same tight grid.
The hub draws nothing from that grid. It brings its own electricity with it and relieves the grid instead of loading it further.
Volcanic soils are rich in minerals but poor in organic matter. In many places, fertile topsoil is imported. Without organic matter, the soil holds no water.
This is the smallest of the three bottlenecks — and the one where an additional benefit falls out at the end. More on that further down, at its proper size.
"We are well aware that we cannot filter everything to 100% straight away, but you have to start."
THE IDEA
AI data centres have three problems: they need more electricity than the grid can deliver. They wait ten years and longer for permits. And they consume cooling water in exactly the places where water is scarce. KaiSo turns that around.
Sun, wind, storage — right at the container. No grid connection, no diesel generator, no combustion. The data goes by satellite.
Instead of one large facility, a swarm of ordinary shipping containers. They stand ready in months, not years.
What the servers give off as waste heat is not cooled away but passed on. That is the actual idea.
The heat drives the treatment of the wastewater. Two waste streams — heat and dirty water — become one cycle.
Computing power earns the money, water and soil are the benefit for the island. The site carries itself on the computing power — everything else improves the balance, but does not have to carry it.
ONE PLATFORM, TWO SETTINGS
The plant is neither a sewage works nor a desalination plant. It is a thermodynamic platform: heat drives the treatment. Depending on the medium that goes in, a different raw material comes out.
SETTING A · FOCUS TENERIFE
IN
Municipal wastewater
OUT
SETTING B · THE CLASSIC CASE
IN
Seawater
OUT
For Tenerife, setting A comes first: the wastewater is the acute problem. Setting B stays open to the same plant — the same technology, a different medium.
WHY THIS CAN GO QUICKLY
The hub connects as a decentralised offtaker directly to the existing sewer network or pumping station. No construction of new central treatment plants, no grid expansion procedures.
Ordinary shipping containers stand ready in months, not years. First results come in months, not in parliamentary terms.
That opens up Interreg-MAC and Spanish water programmes. The rollout can be co-financed at European level.
AN ADDITIONAL BENEFIT, NOT A PROMISE
The waste heat dries and sanitises sewage sludge and supplies its organic structure. Together with recovered nutrients and local volcanic granulate, this produces technically built-up topsoil. The cycle that follows from it is real:
More humus→the soil holds water→less irrigation→less desalination→less island electricity
The order of magnitude belongs to the picture: the plant's primary output is clean water. Sludge drying is considerably smaller in volume — a valuable add-on, not a reshaping of the landscape. Anyone expecting whole valleys here is expecting the wrong thing.
WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOU
PERSPECTIVE 01
PERSPECTIVE 02
PERSPECTIVE 03
PERSPECTIVE 04
WHAT IS HONESTLY OPEN
Whoever knows the limits can decide. That is why they stand here and not in the small print.
It starts in one place and shows what it can do. Anything else would be a promise nobody can keep today — and starting is the point all the same.
The pumps need electricity, and nothing about that changes. The difference is that the heat is a waste product — it arises anyway and costs nothing extra.
Heavy metals, pharmaceutical residues, PFAS. Whether the organic fraction may go onto a field is decided by contaminant testing. That is a check point, not a revenue point.
Containers, servers and treatment equipment are manufactured and transported. Those emissions are reported, not defined away.
A SINGLE STEP
This page is meant to make you curious, not to convince you. Anyone who wants to know how it works technically will get that in conversation — under confidentiality, because parts of the process are pending patent application.
teneriffa@kaiso.worksThe figures on this page come from the system description of KaiSo Technik, the situation on the ground from reports from the island. What is not in there is not here either.