VerdeXchange Panel: ‘One Water' Integrated Resource Plan for L.A.

Adel Hagekhalil: Water is life. The reason we settled in Los Angeles is because of water. People decided to come to Los Angeles because of the L.A. River, and the city survived because people like Mulholland brought water into Los Angeles. The question that we have before us today is, "Are we running out of water?" I would say that the answer is no, we are not running out of water if we manage it responsibly, sustainably, and effectively.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa unveiled an action plan for our water systems and said, "Our future depends upon our willingness to adopt an ethic of sustainability. If we don't commit ourselves to conserving and recycling water, we will tap ourselves out." For Los Angeles, 80 percent of our water comes from somewhere else. At the same time, everyday about 350 million gallons of waste water goes down to the ocean. On a dry day you can see about 100 million gallons of run off from irrigation, etc., that goes down into the Los Angeles River and the ocean. If we have half an inch of rain it joins millions of gallons of water that goes, wasted, down to the ocean. We also have a huge amount of ground water that we can not tap into because of contamination. That is the imbalance that we are talking about.

It is all "one water." That is really the key here. By dealing with it as one water we get even more water...We are not going to have new water. We have to use the same water.

Los Angeles has been facing many challenges-pollution, aging infrastructure, shrinking water supply, and shortened funding...In Los Angeles our leaders are setting up action plans and policies, but one of the major efforts we have done is working together to develop the Integrated Water Management Plan.

All of the water systems are interrelated. For example, water conservation not only lowers our dependence on the water supply, it actually decreases the amount of waste water generated, allowing us to maximize our facilities. When we control over-irrigation and allow more water to enter the ground, or use smarter irrigation, we reduce runoff that usually carries pollution that goes down the waterway that we have to manage.

There are beneficial uses of recycled water. It will help us to reduce the water we import, but at the same time help lead us in sustainability. We have plans to update our treatment plants in the future to allow us to maximize water reuse.

The quantity of water we are using today is the same as we were using 25 years ago, despite the additional 1.5 million who have come to Los Angeles. We estimate that we have saved Los Angeles the need to build a waste water treatment plant that would save the city about 60 million gallons a day.

Storm water is another area that we need to start looking at. We have so much that is being wasted that we can harness and use, especially now that we have to meet regulation to improve our water quality and deal with the runoff. It is all causing pollution that we have to treat in order to ensure that our water meets water quality standards by law...The city of Los Angeles now requires new development to capture the first three-quarters inch of rain and infiltrate it to use on site.

Related to building green-we're taking blacktop and turning it into green streets that allow run off of an area to go infiltration. Recently we took an MTA bus depot and converted that into a storm water wetland treatment facility...In Venice, for example, we have pools that capture runoff that allows it to infiltrate into the ground....The only way we are able to do it is because we have funding due to a $500 million bond measure approved by our ratepayers for water quality projects.

Our mayor has set an aggressive goal to green the city. We all need to work together. Without each other we cannot move forward. Developers have to be willing to invest in these resources to put in recycled water and green technology. Ratepayers have to be willing to pay extra and approve bond measures to help us build these projects. Our Parks Department has to agree to maintain some of these things.

In Los Angeles everyday there is 8 million cubic feet of biogas generated. That is enough fumes to provide energy and electric power to about 23,000 homes. That is energy generated because of the waste water treatment process. It is great green energy. We're also investing in a project to bring biosolids under ground into depleted oil fields in the port area to generate energy for about 3,000 homes. That is innovation-taking a problem like biosolids and instead of transferring it somewhere else we are letting nature do its job and create a green energy for our use.

We are looking at bringing in food waste-grease-into a treatment plant to increase biogas generation. We are looking for ways to bring in more grey water systems, on-site treatment, and on-site waste water treatment to help reduce our dependence on water. I haven't seen too many technologies for grey water systems lately. More needs to be done in that area. We even need to look at sewers. We have a lot of waste water being conveyed across the city that could be used as an energy source, if it is harnessed appropriately...

Thomas Erb: Even today the majority of the city's water supply is imported from hundreds of miles away. That is not sustainable as we move into the future. The state is challenged by climate change, regulatory impacts on our water supply, the Governor's declaration of a drought last year, and, perhaps in the next year, we will see water rationing in Southern California. On top of that, the population projections are increasing. In Los Angeles, by 2030 we could have up to as many as 400,000 new residents here in the city.

We have to come up with a new way to supply water to the city. We are going to do that by developing local resources and not relying on imported water as we have done in the past. The Water Supply Action Plan for the city of Los Angeles was unveiled by the DWP, Mayor Villaraigosa, and the Department of Sanitation last May. We have six actions to implement the goals of the Integrated Resources Plan. Water conservation is first and foremost. You have heard about the accomplishments that we have had in Los Angeles, which have been remarkable, but there is more that we can do. We have specific goals and time frames to develop an additional 50,000 acre-feet of conservation. 50,000 acre-feet is a measure of water that equates to over 6 percent of all the water we have used today in the city of Los Angeles. We can save that much water through conservation. We are looking at things like smart irrigation controllers and other new technology. We will be looking at artificial turf.

In Los Angeles, one of the ways we have saved water is that we have subsidized the installation of well over one million low-flow toilets. We want to use that same concept to get smart integration controllers out there to tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of customers. This way people can save water without having to consciously think about it on a daily basis. That is one of the technologies that we are going to work on with our partners at the Department of Sanitation, and others.

Water recycling is the next important goal following up on the goals of the Integrated Resources Plan. By 2019, in just a little over ten years, we hope to develop 50,000 acre-feet of water recycling in Los Angeles. Again, that is a little over 6 percent of how much water we have used today. We are going to do that in two ways. One way is by expanding our network of what we call "purple pipe," which is recycled water pipe for irrigation and industrial use. We are also going to follow the model that Orange County has successfully implemented for ground water recharge. We have already started our extensive outreach campaign. We have had very good feedback so far. Orange County has helped to heighten awareness about the need for reusing local water supplies. They demonstrated that it can be done safely and economically. We have a long way to go to make sure that we address all of the concerns that we have from ratepayers and customers in the city of Los Angeles. That is part of our plan: to use ground water recycling to meet those goals. Some things we are going to need for water recycling: of course we are going to need the facilities; we are going to need pipelines; we are going to need new technologies like reverse osmosis membranes to help treat that water.

Storm water capture is the next thing. We are involved in a number of collaborative projects with the L.A. County Flood Control District and others to capture more of the water that runs off very quickly after a storm. There is so much water that runs off into the ocean in a storm. If we could find a way to capture just a percentage of that we can help augment our water supply significantly. We are looking at green streets, rain barrel cisterns...all of these are technologies that can be incorporated in not only new construction, but also existing construction.

Another initiative we have is to clean up the contaminated San Fernando ground water basin, which has been the source of 15 percent of the city's water supply. We are going to be looking at technology to clean up that ground water basin. We will be looking at what kinds of treatment methods are best suited. We may look at more monitoring mills and even moving the locations of our ground water wells. There will be some significant projects coming out of that.

Ground water storage is another management tool we are looking at very strongly. There are opportunities right here, under our feet, in the Central Basin. There is a lot of storage capacity that is not being used. We are talking to the other agencies that have water rights in the basin, trying to come up with ways to develop that storage. We are looking outside of the basin in the Antelope Valley, along the Los Angeles aqueduct, and maybe elsewhere. There are places we can store water outside of the basin that could help us in a dry year to offset the water loses we would have from imported water...

...The only way we can accomplish all of these goals is by partnering with others. The ways that we did things in the past-by one city agency implementing or pursuing a goal-is not the way things have to be done today. We have a team at the Bureau of Sanitation and many other city agencies, the Mayor's Office is included, and we also have partners with a lot of external agencies: L.A. County Flood Control, the Metropolitan Water District, Tree People, the Watershed Council. There are a lot of partners who are instrumental in meeting these goals. We are approaching the water reuse and efficiency measures from a regional standpoint. That is the only way we are going to achieve these goals.

Kellene Burn-Roy: As we all know, our needs are mounting and our resources are shrinking. In fact, right now as we are here at this VerdeXchange Conference, our need to do something about the impact of climate change is even more paramount. We need to be even more vigilant about how we are using our resources and how we impact the energy that is consumed by our actions.

I want to talk about pushing the envelope. What are other agencies doing? What else is possible; what else can we do? We are all creative people. We all want to do the right thing, and we are trying to do the right thing, but we can learn from others. I'm going to talk about four areas that other agencies are working in to try and push the envelope: creating water supply from waste water, using waste water for heat and energy, creating a natural energy source to electricity, and capturing the storm water runoff for use in our water supply.

You heard a little bit about Orange County. They successfully completed construction at the end of 2007. They are up and running and producing 75,000 acre-feet per year of water. They are taking treated waste water and taking it one step further, to a higher level of purification, through micro filtration, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet light for disinfection. It serves more than 300,000 families and ultimately it is going to produce 130,000 acre-feet per year. It is a great source of water and it is drought free.

One of the things we want to combine today is talking about water and how it ties in with energy. The ground water replenishment system in Orange County is saving energy in significant amounts. Every drop of water that the ground water replenishment system in Orange County produces does not have to be imported from the North. It takes half the energy to produce ground water replenishment than to import water. The former is a reliable source; it is drought free; it is local; and it conserves energy.

Waste water can be a source of heat. We don't think of it that way, but if you think about it biologically it is actually heated water as it goes through the system. A very small community, Avon, Colorado wanted to do something environmentally friendly that addressed two of their needs. They wanted to have additional heat for their facilities and the pretreatment of their biosolids. They also wanted to find a way to take care of their effluent because the temperature in their effluent was causing problems with the river and the ecosystems down stream. They created a multi-prong community heat recovery system that does two things: it takes the heat out of the waste water at the treatment plant effluent site using a mechanical heat pump that is powered by wind generated electricity. They also put solar thermal heating panels throughout their plant. They are taking those two heat sources and creating pre-heating for some of their processes as well as space heating.

You might think, "Well that's neat. How does that tie in and apply to L.A.?" Well, it does apply because we have the same types of needs. We have the need for pretreatment for our digesters. We can use the same technology to take heat out of our wastewater stream. We can also use it to heat and cool the buildings at and near the treatment plant. It is something that we can look at that we have not done yet...

...Lastly, you heard a lot about the storm water system and the billions of gallons that are going down to the ocean. Singapore has created a "four-tap strategy"...But the biggest difference for them is that they have improved their storm water catchments for their raw water supply through a ground-breaking project which actually took 20 years to come to fruition; the Marina Barrage project, which is now complete. It is a 350-meter sophisticated dam system across the Marina Channel and it has two benefits. One, it prevents the high tides from flooding those low-lying inland areas but it also creates this huge, brand new, fresh water reservoir. That is something that we can do here as well. They have actually been able to improve their capture of rainwater so that it is now 67 percent of their water supply. That is a huge increase from 50 percent....

...There is a lot going on. Technology and innovation are continuing. We are not done yet. Los Angeles is a shining example of what can be done. I repeat... there is still more to do.