20 Aug Let’s Save a Billion Dollars – Water Efficiency Is Both Necessary and Readily Available

Water is essential for human life.

We can live without a lot of things, but we can’t live more than a few days without water. We can live without cars. We can live without electricity. And for most of human history we have lived without cars and electricity, but we have never lived without water. Climate predictions for Central Texas indicate more heat and less rain, which means less water flowing into the Colorado River, the Edwards Aquifer, and all of their contributing watersheds.

Given the utmost importance of this scarce liquid, and a good chance that its scarcity will only increase, we should give utmost thought and careful consideration to how we use water. We must ask ourselves as individuals, businesses, residents, families, and – perhaps most importantly, as local government and local water utilities, “Are we using water as efficiently as we reasonably and affordably can?” If we are not using water as efficiently as we can, we should immediately increase efficiency in water use. In other words, conservation is a must.

Not surprisingly, “Conservation is now widely accepted as the most cost-effective way to extend water resources,” according to a report by an LCRA water conservation task force, which included a rep from the City of Austin. Increasing efficiency through conservation lowers the demand for treated water. If we increase efficiency at the same rate that population grows, our total water use remains constant. If our population grows 1.5% or 3%, if we increase efficiency (less wasteful lawn watering, better toilets, more rainwater collection) at a corresponding rate (whether 1.5% or 3% or any number) the total amount of water used remains where it is today. If our water use in the summer remains flat or goes down, there is absolutely no pressure to spend a billion dollars on a new water treatment plant. Yet that is exactly what our rate-payer owned water utility wants to do. Our summer “peak” water use has dropped significantly from our all time high in 2001, but there is still “low hanging fruit” available for gains in efficiency and reduction in wasteful water use – water “abuse,” if you will.

This summer our highest day of water use was in July, when one one day we used 220 million gallons of treated water. Our all time record high was 241 million gallons on one day in 2001. The City Council passed conservation measures in 2006 that switched lawn watering to a twice-a-week schedule in which nobody is allowed to water on Mondays. In just the second summer of the new schedule, Mondays are by far the lowest water use days during dry weather. (When it rains, people don’t water their lawns as much. Which is good.) The fact that Monday is clearly the lowest shows that Austinites care about water and are willing to change their routines to help achieve a common goal of reduced water waste. The difference between an average Monday and the average of Tuesday through Sunday is about 35 million gallons a day. That’s roughly the amount we use on lawn watering and other outdoor irrigation. 35 million gallons a day!

We are about to go into drought restrictions due to low levels in Lakes Travis and Buchanan. Lawn watering will be restricted to one day a week starting August 24th. This should chop the 30 million gallons per day of lawn watering roughly in half. And with the stroke of a pen, the City will have reduced its water demand by 15 million to 20 million gallons per day. With two strokes of the pen (first the move to two day watering, then one day watering), the City will have saved the gallon equivalent of 75% of the capacity of the billion dollar water treatment plant that the water utility is itching to build. The “first phase” of proposed water treatment plant 4 will be able to treat 50 million gallons a day. Dropping peak day water use from 240 million gallons to 200 million would be a drop of 40 million gallons, or 75% of 50 million gallons. We’ll have to see how much water use drops when one day per week watering kicks in, but the point is that without spending more than a few thousand dollars, we can drastically cut unnecessary lawn watering and more than offset increased demand from population increases.

The Austin Water Utility is using our all time record high water use of 240 million gallons per day as its starting point for future demand projections, even though we have ten years of declining summer water use despite the addition of hundreds of thousands of people to the utility system. The water utility wants the City Council to authorize spending a billion dollars (including interest on borrowing $400 million from Wall Street) to build a water treatment plant, but they won’t come clean with the basis for their demand projections. The utility assumes that water use increases in parallel with population growth. The utility’s own data show the opposite – that water use in the hot summer months has gone down even as population has gone up.

I can think of a lot of things we could do with a billion dollars to further reduce water use and abuse. Our summer watering use can drop further if we try. And try we must. We owe it to the place we call home, to our children and grandchildren, and seven generations from now to be stewards of the water we are blessed to have. We need to shift our approach toward water toward maximum efficiency. Not only is it the responsible thing to do for the Colorado River and all of our water resources, it’s far cheaper than expanding an out-dated system that treats water as a commodity, at best, a nuisance to be moved around, at worst.

For more details on how to achieve vastly improved water conservation, check out David Venhuizen’s blog here: http://www.austineconet.wpengine.com/content/water-conservation-vs-wtp4-unexplored-territory

Picture: Courtesy of Treehugger.com