Idea Transcript
When George Hawkins took over Washington, D.C.’s water authority in 2009, the agency was still reeling from a Flint-style scandal eight years earlier, when its drinking water was revealed to have lead levels 5 to 20 times the EPA limit. There were charges of a coverup; a study later determined that 42,000 kids had been put at risk of health problems. For one of the nation's largest water systems, a piece of urban infrastructure serving more than half a million people, it was a profound embarrassment whose effects lingered through the decade. Today, Washington is widely considered to have one of the most advanced public water and wastewater systems in the world. Lead levels have consistently been below the federal limit, and DC Water is seen as a technological pioneer. The man behind its new reputation, people widely agree, is Hawkins. Named Governing Magazine’s 2014 Public Official of the Year, the fast-talking Hawkins is considered a leader among urban water thinkers. He began his tenure by rebranding the agency, changing its name from the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority to DC Water and creating a new slogan, “Water is Life.” Since then, he has implemented numerous innovations to lower costs and improve efficiency of the agency, from novel financing schemes like a 100-year bond to new techniques for filtering waste. Most notably, he has begun turning sewage into electrical power, with a new waste-to-energy program that “digests” solids from wastewater and turns them into methane gas, which is burned at an on-site power plant. The program opened last October and is the largest in the world, a first-of-its-kind experiment to turn a costly byproduct of humans into a valuable resource. To Hawkins, the key to his success lies in rethinking the underlying premise of the agency. “We don't have wastewater coming in here,” he said. “We have enriched water.” A waste-toenergy system treats the "enrichment" not as sewage, which it also is, but a resource. The goal is not to minimize cost but to look at the entire water system as a set of resources that can be used more efficiently. His vision for the future is built on this philosophy, from finding new uses for excess phosphorous to fixing water main breaks before they happen to using sewers to generate heat. What challenges face American water systems, and what does DC’s experience have to offer? On a rainy, overcast day, I visited Hawkins at DC Water’s headquarters five miles due south of the Capitol, across the Anacostia River. The sprawling facility is too large to walk around, so Hawkins and his chief of external affairs, John Lisle, gave me a tour in a car. Hawkins makes no excuses about the challenges facing water systems today. Fixing aging infrastructure is going to require more money, no matter what, and that will be especially challenging for low-income communities. New challenges lie ahead: Climate change is set to make all these problems harder. But Hawkins is optimistic that Americans will come to cherish water—both clean and “enriched”—as a resource not to be taken for granted. The day after I visited, DC Water announced a new idea for reusing the solid waste left over after the digestion process: a soil amendment called Bloom. Water infrastructure has become a national flash point. What challenges do other communities face that you've been able to overcome? There's two challenges. One is economics. When you look at the cities that are really good at this, in Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and New York, it's the cities you'd expect. They are economically vibrant. They have the revenue coming in. They can afford to do it. The second issue is size. One of the challenges in the water world is that just on the drinking water side, there are 53,000 water authorities in the United States, more than 95 percent of which serve less than 10,000 people. They're very small. … If you are a very small authority, even an area that has plenty of revenue, you may not have the organizational size and capacity to handle projects like this. So what can they do to solve these problems? The difficulty that almost every community, whether it's DC Water or one that is more economically challenged, has in raising rates is the consequences of those rates on the very lowest income customers. [The Low Income Heating Assistance Program] is a working model, something Congress has supported for many years. … [It] is federal funding that is income-based. This is not a broad subsidy for all utilities to do all their work. It’s to help the very lowest income customers pay their bills. The advantage of that would be if the Flint Water Authority had to raise their rates to do some of the work that’s necessary, if there was a support network in place like there is for power for the lowest income customers, that would take one of the biggest reasons for not raising the rates off. There are many cities that have a tremendously hard time raising revenue from a disadvantaged or a declining population. The question then becomes, how do we smartly deploy funds to make it so the limited dollars that a utility has are spent in the best way? Some analytics and data can make the money that you do have go farther as you spend it in a much more thoughtful fashion. And some of that is just cold hard cash. You’re known for your interest in technology. When you're thinking out 10, 20, 30 years from now, how will technology be changing water systems? It may not even take 20 or 30 years. It may happen faster than that. But I think the core will be that every facility like this is a resource center as opposed to just a draining cost. … If you took every facility like this and generated power at it, that would become a significant portion of the clean energy solution for the United States or anywhere else in the world. It's permanent. It doesn't require sunlight. It doesn't require wind. It just requires people who are alive. The second revolution we see coming is that what's getting much less expensive is localized sensors and big data. You're a customer of ours in D.C. If we can put a sensor of ours on your line that can read pH, that can look at turbidity, that can look at the pressure of your water—all sorts of things that can be real-time tested. You could have that on your phone, so you have an up-to-the-minute sense of how clean the water is in your home. It turns out water-main breaks cause certain kinds of vibrations before they occur. If we install sensors, we'll know it before it happens. We could fix a water-main break that's going to happen in front of your house before it happens in a way that you won't ever know that it was going to happen. Do you think this new technology will change the relationship between consumers and water utilities? You can generate power from a solar array on site that you can use. Well, you may want to capture stormwater at your apartment or your house so you can use that stormwater in a barrel and water your yard with it and not have to buy water from us. Some utilities would view that with fear. "Oh my gosh, that's going to lose our business." My reaction is that's opening up a whole new market. Who knows more about how to do that kind of work than we do? It's not just going to be us innovating at giant, centralized facilities like this. It's going to be reaching into the community, doing work at each person's home, their businesses. How that place can become more water efficient, how that place can store stormwater and use it on site, and use it to grow more greenery so it's more beneficial, it's healthier, there's more shade, better for air quality. And it's using water that's already coming on the site. We want to be part of making that change. Essentially, we want to “uber” ourselves. And I think it's perfectly possible. What challenges did you face in setting up your new wastewater-to-energy program? These are the giant digesters. They are 130 feet across, which would be a 13-story building. And they are 70 feet tall. So those are just mammoth digesters. But without some sort of special treatment process, a typical length of time that biosolids have to stay in a digester for the little bugs to generate the methane is 20 days. We have 60 tanker trucks, or 1,200 wet tons of biosolids, every day. You'd have to build enough tanks so that when you'd put one set in, you'd have to have enough tanks to take the next day’s [biosolids], and the next day’s and the next day’s and so on. And we didn't have enough space here. How did you overcome that? First, we processed the sludge into a very consistent material that's been cleaned and prepared, refined and ready. These are the CAMBI canisters, very similarly sized and they look like steamers. They cook that material at very high pressure and very high temperatures. … Think of putting a very hot plate under cold water, it cracks. The cell walls of all the microbes burst because of the release of the pressure and the change in temperature. Boom! They burst so when it goes into the digester, the bugs do their work much faster and much more efficiently. It's like a turbocharge. The other thing is that the heat reduces the quantity of the biosolids. This is the largest installation of thermohydrolysis in the world. First time it's been used in North America. So far, it has been a spectacular success. It's very intricate, as you can see. We are generating up to 13 megawatts of power. It's a combined heat and power plant. This is a self-powered facility. What other innovative ideas interest you? We're taking phosphorous out because we don't want it in the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay. Phosphorous is a very valuable international commodity. How can we use that? We're interested in potentially generating heating and cooling from sewers. What other big problems do you see on the horizon? The two big ones are resilience and climate change—harder storms, harder winters, harder summers, harder droughts, harder floods. That’s hell on an infrastructure system. We’re not designed to handle peaks any more than a parking lot is. The second challenge is just the old systems themselves that need to be updated. The third challenge is a new generation of problems independent of the quality of the infrastructure. The widespread use of hormones, the kinds of medicines we're seeing in the water, the kinds of contaminants that [our systems] weren’t originally designed to remove. We now know more about them. We can test more about them. It's not clear whether they're a risk or not. A category which is nerve-racking is new contaminants. It’s almost like lead. In very small concentrations, there’s worries about lead which makes it a much more difficult problem to solve. There's a lot of these new kinds of emerging contaminants, with all the men using products to enhance their functioning, a lot of that ends up in the water. A lot of birth control medicines end up in the water. A lot of hormones used in production of food ends up in the water in small amounts, but we're not quite sure what that all means. What are the solutions? We’re not quite sure what the problem is, other than we know they're there. The solution at the moment, and I don't usually say this, but this is one where truly more research is needed before we can make smart decisions about how to allocate very scarce dollars. Let’s think real long term. What is your vision for 50, even 100 years from now? Water is the issue that I worry about for our species because weather systems are getting more extreme, more problems with drought, more issues with flooding. I think that everybody 20, 30, 40, 50 years out is going to have to become part of the solution. As opposed to the way it's been, where I suspect that you never really thought who your water company was or where the water came from or where it went when it went down the drain. Instead, [let’s] have water be on somebody's mind. It's important. Everyone becomes part of the solution and it's only by adding up all those features that you start seeing a solution for water issues broadly. ... I'm very excited [about] the prospects. It's going to take a lot of work but I think water is going to be absolutely central … in seeing that we can make the world a place we can live in for our kids and their kids. This interview was edited and condensed from phone and in-person interviews.