On October 1, EPA added municipal wastewater facilities to ENERGY STAR’s online energy management tool, Portfolio Manager. Participants in CEE’s Municipal Water and Wastewater Initiative have eagerly awaited a national energy performance rating system to educate their municipal customers about energy efficiency. Members had the opportunity to learn more about ENERGY STAR’s Water and Wastewater focus, and the new benchmarking tool, during the CEE Industry Partner meeting in St. Louis. CEE members, ENERGY STAR, and industry partners discussed how the tool could help increase demand for efficiency in the municipal wastewater sector.

Typically, wastewater operators are driven by public demand for clean water, meeting water quality regulations, maintaining system reliability, and working within limited capital and operations budgets. They are seldom aware of energy use; in fact, most of them never see their energy bills. Due to competing pressures, reaching this audience with information about energy efficiency has proven difficult for efficiency program administrators. In addition to water and wastewater facility operators, it is also necessary to gain the support of other important stakeholders, such as regulators at regional or state levels, or members of the political entity controlling the water district such as mayors, city councilors, or city managers. Greater energy consumption from new treatment technologies and rising energy costs are expected to provide an opening for greater energy efficiency.

Increasing the visibility of wastewater treatment energy consumption—and costs—among municipal decision makers and gaining their support for efficiency was an early objective of the CEE Municipal Water and Wastewater Initiative. An energy performance rating, or benchmark, for municipal water and wastewater treatment plants is a valuable tool for programs to help municipal customers track energy performance, target specific energy efficiency upgrades, and evaluate the success of energy efficiency projects.

Funded by the California Energy Commission over the last three years, the CEE Water and Wastewater Committee has provided input to the AWWA Research Foundation (AwwaRF) on a project to develop a statistical model to serve as the basis of a national energy performance rating system for wastewater systems. Through the project, AwwaRF collected survey data from municipal water and wastewater facilities and then correlated water utility characteristics to energy use in a statistically representative sample of the industry. This correlation provided a means to normalize or remove the influence of multiple factors impacting energy use that are outside the control of the water utility, (e.g. water source, distribution topography, effluent quality, etc.) so that a meaningful comparison could be made among utilities nationwide. The AwwaRF study was completed this fall.

During the CEE Industry Partners Meeting, Katy Hatcher of EPA and Julio Rovie of the Cadmus Group, explained that ENERGY STAR’s performance rating system for wastewater is based on the AwwaRF model. Using Portfolio Manager, the rating system compares the energy performance of an individual facility (source energy consumption per million gallons of flow) with similar facilities nationwide. Portfolio Manager requires the following information to make this assessment:

• Zip code
• Average influent flow
• Average influent biological oxygen demand (BOD5)
• Average effluent biological oxygen demand (BOD5)
• Plant design flow rate
• Presence of fixed film trickle filtration process
• Presence of nutrient removal process.

A performance rating is generated by taking the ratio of actual source energy use to the energy use predicted by the model. The system expresses performance on a scale of 1-to-100, where a rating of 75 or higher indicates that a facility is in the top quartile for its peer group. For more information, see the ENERGY STAR Web site.

Discussion in St. Louis focused on the opportunity for CEE members to incorporate the ENERGY STAR energy performance benchmark into their efficiency programs. During the meeting, Peter Turnbull, program manager at PG&E, shared his experience using Portfolio Manager in PG&E’s commercial buildings program. PG&E is using Portfolio Manager to collect, input, and track energy performance of state buildings in Northern California. He noted that the ability for building operators to identify and manage energy trends over time is a powerful incentive for efficiency. Representatives of the pump industry, power management industry, and wastewater facility design and engineering industry attending the CEE meeting agreed that incorporating the ENERGY STAR benchmark into their standard marketing and sales channels could help seed demand for higher efficiency products and services in the wastewater sector as well.

The CEE Municipal Water and Wastewater Committee is planning a number of activities to explore the potential value of benchmarking wastewater facilities to efficiency programs.

First, CEE staff is coordinating with ENERGY STAR to demonstrate the energy performance rating system to the Committee through dedicated webinars. Second, the Committee plans to review the test results of the benchmarking system. For instance, AwwaRF worked with NYSERDA to test the energy performance model on 16 wastewater facilities in New York, and EPA Region 1 tested the Portfolio Manager tool on five wastewater plants in New England.

Over the next few months, the Committee will be working with members who have volunteered to test the ENERGY STAR benchmarking system on wastewater facilities within their service territories. The purpose of these member-sponsored pilot tests is to help CEE members become more familiar with the ENERGY STAR benchmarking tool and to identify opportunities their programs can take full advantage of. It is also a good opportunity for the Committee to assess the tool’s performance and provide comments back to ENERGY STAR as appropriate. “We look forward to sharing member experiences using Portfolio Manager with their municipal wastewater customers at CEE’s January meeting in Long Beach,” said Ted Jones, CEE senior program manager. “It will also be a good opportunity to identify measures that members can support to help wastewater customers improve their benchmarking scores.” For more information, contact Ted Jones.

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