Facilities that are designed for flow rates of 4 million gallons per day, will operate at such rates even if current flow rates are half that. Without accurate monitoring and controls, facilities will consume energy at rate based upon their capacity, not current flow rates. While many facilities have the necessary monitoring and control capabilities to manage their energy consumption, these are generally urban or suburban facilities. These control and monitoring systems are rare in small to medium rural communities – communities that need to operate their facilities for today’s needs, not those in 20 years. To restate, the foundation of this project rests on two primary facts in the wastewater industry, particularly true for small to medium facilities;
•= Facilities are typically designed for a 20 year-life, under “worst case” conditions,
without risk of failure, and
•= These same facilities, particularly small to medium, are designed without significant
process control technologies and therefore are required to pay tomorrow’s O&M costs
today.
These over-engineered facilities lead to excessive energy expenditures in communities that are struggling to balance their budgets. It is our view that the 25 to 75 percent savings achieved by facilities, through our program that modifies facility operation using state-of-the-art monitoring and controls, would be welcomed relief to rural California communities.
The MWRP, quite simply, turns down the use of aeration equipment. Through sophisticated modeling of facility biology, installation of real-time biological data collection equipment, proprietary software modeling, and system controls, the MWRP will cause significant reduction in energy and demand in the rural municipal wastewater sector.
Energy Saving is very important for us.