U.S. Department of Energy’s TAP WebinarPage 1 of 11
The Energy-Water Nexus: State and Local Roles in Efficiency
Water and Wastewater Treatment Facilities
Amy Hollander, Molly Lunn, Barry Liner, Lisa Henderson
Madelene Rafalko, Peter Cavagnaro, Joe Gierlach
Amy Hollander:I’d like to welcome you to today’s webinar entitled, “Energy Conservation in Water and Wastewater Treatment”. We have an excellent webinar today with four different speakers from around the nation. We will give folks a few minutes to log in and call. So, while we wait, I’ll go over some logistics and then we’ll get going with today’s webinar.I want to mention that this webinar will be recorded and everyone today is in listen-only mode.You have two options for how you can hear today’s webinar.
In the upper right corner of your screen, there’s a box that says “audio mode”. This will allow you to choose whether or not you want to listen to the webinar through your computer speakers or a telephone. As a rule, if you can listen to music on your computer, you should be able to hear the webinar. Select either “use telephone” or “use mike and speakers”. If you select use telephone, the box will display the telephone number and a specific audio pin you should use to dial in. If you select mike and speaker, you might want to click on audio setup to test your audio.
We will have a question-and-answer session at the end of the presentation. You can participate by submitting your questions electronically during the webinar. Please do this by opening the red arrow in the upper right corner of the webinar window if you haven’t already done that and go to the questions pane. There you can type in any question you have during the course of the webinar. Our speakers will address as many questions as time allows over the presentation.
So before getting started with today’s presentation, I’d like to introduce Molly Lunn. Molly is a program analyst with the U.S.Department of Energy Weatherization and Intergovernmental Programs. She will give you a brief description about the WIPTechnical Assistance Program and other upcoming webinars in the series. Molly?
Molly Lunn:Thanks, Amy. And hi, everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar on the Energy-Water Nexus specifically focusing on state and local roles in efficiency and water and wastewater treatment plants. Today, we’re talking about water and wastewater treatment, because of the large energy impacts it has both for our region and then specifically for municipalities and their electricity use. Some of our technical speakers will talk a little bit more about that impact, but it’s pretty significant and so it’s worth our time here today.
So on the next slide, you’ll hear a little bit more about the Technical Assistance Program broadly for state and local officials. We’ve been around for a while. And our focus is on supporting the state, local and tribal officials with resources to help you all advance successful and high-impact energy policies and programs and projects.So we focus on five priority areas. Those being strategic energy planning, program and policy design and implementation, financing strategies, data management and EM&V and EE and RE technologies.Obviously, today’s session sort of bridges that gap between both efficiency technologies as well as program policy design, because we’re really thinking about what kinds of programs state governments can set up to help support local governments and what kinds of actions local governments can take as well.Within those areas, we develop resources. We offer training and peer exchange like today’s webinar. And then for more in-depth efforts, we can help connect you one-on-one with technical experts.
So the next slide highlights a couple of our specific resources for efficiency and renewable energy technologies.
First up, as Amy said, we do offer several webinars on a monthly basis. Upcoming, we have two webinars focused on the efficiency and renewable energy technology space versus on state applications for combined team power technologies. That will be later this month. And then next month, we’ll be offering one on efficiency initiatives in multi-family housing. Again, both of these are focused on sort of how state and local governments can support this work. And you can check those out on our Solution Center under Events. That’s also where you can find the recording for today’s session and the slides. Those will be available in about a week or two.
In terms of resources, I just want to highlight a couple of things quickly. From DOE, in our Advanced Manufacturing Office, we have a whole host of resources in what is called their Energy Resource Center. That includes things really on the technology side, so tools for assessing energy efficiency in pumps and motors and drives, which are often the key aspect of water treatment and wastewater treatment plants.Then a couple of resources that I know will be highlighted later on both by Barry and others, the Water Energy Foundation’s Matrices of Best Practices and Energy Roadmap as well as EPA’s State and Local Guide to Energy Efficiency in Water and Wastewater Facilities. They also have a whole program dedicated to sustainable water. So those are some of the links here that you can check out.
If we go to the next slide, many of these resources can be accessed on our State and Local Solution Center. That’s our web portal for our resources. We are in the process right now of updating our technology deployment section of our site and so that will be live later this year. And we’ll make sure the ones that aren’t already posted there will be. That site is also where you can submit an application for one-on-one assistance.
And then we encourage you, if you’re not already, to sign up for our Technical Assistance Program alerts, which is our mailing list and how you can stay up to date on all of our latest and greatest. So that e-mail is there if you want to e-mail us or if you have any questions.
So, with that, I want to say thanks again to Amy Hollander from NREL for hosting today’s session, to Barry Liner from the Water Environment Foundation for providing his technical expertise. And then much appreciation goes to all of our peer speakers today. We have a great host of speakers –Lisa Henderson from the State of Arizona; Madelene Rafalko from Fort Worth, Texas; and Peter Cavagnaro from Johnson Controls; and then Joe Gierlach from Nederland, Colorado. They’ll all be sharing with us their on the ground experiences, which I think are really often the most valuable stories we can tell.
So, thanks to all of you for joining us. And I encourage you to take just a minute at the end to fill out your feedback form. That’s how we can make sure that these webinars are really useful for you all and improve our resources moving forward. So, with that, I’ll turn things back over to Amy.
Amy Hollander:Great. Thank you, Molly. Now let’s go ahead and get started with today’s webinar.
I would like to introduce today’s first speaker, Barry Liner, who is our technical expert. Barry of the Water Environment Federation known as WEF is the director of WEF’s Water Science & Engineering Center and is the principal in charge of WEF’s Energy and Innovation Initiatives. He has over 20 years of experience in a variety of areas of the water and energy sectors including working in consulting engineering, working with the World Bank, working in academia in regulatory analysis and in equipment manufacturing. He holds many degrees in engineering, economics and business. Thank you for joining us, Barry. Take it away.
Barry Liner:Thank you, Amy. I’m honored to be here to help out today especially with NREL. A little story, I actually received my master’s degree developing a program called WATERGY under a grant from NREL about 20 years ago, so it’s really nice to be involved still to this day. What I cover is why is energy use in the water sector important and some of the technologies and what the situation looks like from the water perspective.
Often times, we talk about the water use at power plants and other energy facilities. You’ve probably seen some of these stats about the flipside of that and that’s the energy use of the water sector. But 3 to 4 percent of domestic electricity is being spent for water and wastewater treatment and distribution.And then, recently, a CDC study basically shows 19percent of California’s electricity is focused on water and wastewater and that actually includes end use water heating at the household level. But one of the most important things is that 3 to 4 percent of total electricity is a big deal.But when you’re talking about at a municipality, water resources can be 30 to 50 percent of their total electricity use, greater than street lighting and greater than any other electricity uses. So it’s a big deal.
When we’re looking at drinking water facilities, we’re generally looking at about 1,000 to 2,500 kilowatt hours per million gallons treated and over 80 percent of that is pumping normally. And as we look at new, tighter regulations both on the water and wastewater side, we have new treatment, higher-tech treatment processes coming into play that even have the potential to add additional energy use.So for a couple of the figures that are put up here, including reverse osmosis at about 1,800 kilowatt hours per million gallons, there are some major advances now in the membrane technology that is bringing that down by about 25 to 30percent, but even so that’s still a large amount of energy use.
On the wastewater side, we are looking at between 1,000 and 4,000kilowatt hours per million gallons. And the flipside of this is the pumping is about an order of magnitude less than what a drinking water facility is. The vast majority or at least 50 percent of the electricity is generally used for the blowers for aeration at a wastewater facility.
Now, one of the interesting aspects is that the wastewater coming into a plant generally contains between two and ten times the amount of energy needed to treat it in terms of chemical, thermal energy in there and organic material that’s in the facilities. So we can actually use that energy to turn a wastewater plant into an energy generation facility.
In fact, this statement that’s up here right now is something that we – WEF passed a position statement in 2011 that wastewater treatment plants are not waste disposal, but rather water resource recovery facilities that can produce NEW – nutrients (phosphorus and nitrogen); energy with the E; and W for clean water. And there are plants that are wastewater resource facilities that are now net energy generators. But there’s a lot of barriers in the way in order to move towards that resource recovery focus.
Now, I know this slide and a couple of slides coming up in the near future are very heavily text based and that’s so that you can research them later. So I’m not going to be going through every single point that’s on the slides. But these are some key barriers that were identified during a workshop with the EPA and Department of Energy last November. And if you look at some of the barriers on here, some of the key ones are that energy from biosolids and wastewater are not universally considered renewable and not necessarily considered in renewable portfolio standards. And even sometimes when they are, they’re not considered at parity with wind and solar and other traditional renewable energies. And dealing with 50 different states and there’s little tie-in between federal policy and state policy often on energy efficiency. And I know that I’m preaching to choir almost literally now. So when we’re looking at some of the solutions that were brought up, some of the things are looking at harmonizing ESCO legislation in all 50 states so that energy service companies can work at water and wastewater facilities as well.
The report with these barriers and solutions is available as a free download, okay, on these sites. So there’s a couple of free resources or there’s a lot of free resources, but these are a couple that I would highly recommend you look at.
The Energy Roadmap, which WEF puts out, there’s six pages of matrices of best practices, very bulleted, very easy to use and very high level. And then at that link right there, the energy water link on the first one, will also get you to the same page to download the report with the barriers and recommended actions coming out of that as well.
The EPA, it’s Energy Efficiency in Water and Wastewater Facilities, EPA has a very nice report on how to move forward with a program. It’s a little more detailed than the Energy Roadmap, which is high level, bulleted points. This is a more how-to guide that is freely available on the EPA website.
And then also another thing, taking the Energy Roadmap, we have a free e-learning course, “Drivers Ed for the Energy Roadmap”, that anybody can get quickly updated and learn how they can facilitate energy efficiency in generation of water and wastewater facilities.
So I want to go through real quickly, like I said, this is one of the slides that’s very heavily text based, just to give you an example of these. Please feel free to download them or go look at the slides in more detail. But in order to drive water and wastewater utilities to sustainable energy management, the Energy Roadmap was developed based on something similar to the Smart Grid Maturity Model and is based on six topic areas and then within each topic area kind of a progression of best practices to get everything in place to enable you to move forward towards energy efficiency and sustainability, integrate and then optimize that.
So we’re looking at the first one here “Strategic Management” as four different themes within that – the direction; financial viability; collaborative partnerships; and towards carbon neutrality. And a couple of points on this one. First thing, it doesn’t say become carbon neutral, because we don’t want to set ourselves up for failure, but we want to move towards carbon neutrality.
And the second thing is if you take a notice at collaborative partnerships, one of the key areas of moving towards more sustainable energy management is to partner between water, wastewater, gas, electric, even solid waste and work with the various stakeholders that are out in the marketplace.
The next area was organizational culture. And that’s basically you need to have the support and the team and integrate that into the way that the water/wastewater utility is going to work. And if you notice empowerment is a key thing that comes up in the organizational culture.
The third area is communication and outreach. This is set up a little differently than the other areas, but it’s focused on the various stakeholder communities. Especially for this audience, look at the regulatory and legislative practices in there. And Lisa will be talking a lot about that in the next presentation.
And then we get into what we more traditionally see demand side management, the conservation side. And the four different themes in there are electricity costs and billing, power measurement and control, energy management, and source control. One of the key things we tell people is to understand what your electric bill really looks like first and then you can start doing energy audits and figuring out what are the next steps to take.
And then there’s one other area, source control. On the wastewater side, we have had a history of having high-strength surcharges and industrial-strength waste that we try to keep out of the wastewater flow. And what we’re seeing now is we want to get that waste in so that we can use that in anaerobic digestion and use that organic loading to maximize our energy production, which I’ll get into in a little bit.
The fifth area is energy generation and that includes obtaining energy from the water and, primarily, this is on the wastewater side, but also you can do this on the drinking water side in terms of micro-hydra, inline hydropower as well. And then, supplemental energy sources, so that would be your traditional renewables such as solar and wind plus co-digestion, which is bringing in other high-strength waste from another source into the anaerobic digesters at the wastewater facility. And, of course, the RECs in there are working to actually use renewable energy certificates and RPS efforts as well.
And the final of the six topic areas for moving toward sustainable energy management is innovating for the future. And if you’ll notice that this is investing in research and development, risk management as opposed to risk avoidance and aversion. We need to manage risks to better address the infrastructure needs that we’re facing in the water and wastewater side. And then evaluating alternative treatment in both technologies and management approaches, because it’s not just about treatment. There are other ways to run systems, decentralized options, green infrastructure as opposed to pipesinfrastructure as well that are available.