Associate Professor Rowan University, New Jersey, United States
Abstract Submission: Regulatory agencies in the US are bringing increased pressure on heavy electric users–including water utilities–to use benchmarking techniques to analyze energy use in facilities. The potential benefits of benchmarking energy use for water utilities are clear. Benchmarking can identify the best and the worst energy performers, highlighting facilities that might be good candidates for more detailed analysis of energy use. However, simple normalization, resulting in energy intensity with units of energy per mass of water per year, does not result in effective metrics for energy use due to differences in various structural, geographical, and regulatory factors across facilities that fundamentally affect energy intensity. Appropriate benchmarking methods that will account for these factors for both drinking water treatment plants (DWTPs) and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are under development, but there is not a strong consensus in the literature regarding the best approaches for these tasks. Additional research efforts are required to fully leverage the benefits of benchmarking for applications in water systems. This presentation will discuss energy use associated with drinking water extraction and treatment in several drinking water systems in New Jersey. Initial efforts toward normalization are presented, followed by a study of factors that affect the resulting energy intensity of drinking water. The results are used to compare the efficiency of extraction and treatment facilities, and several especially strong and weak facilities are identified for further study. Recommendations are made for benchmarking approaches that can be extended to other drinking water systems.
Learning Objectives/Expected Outcome (Optional) : 1) Explain why benchmarking energy use for drinking water systems is important. 2) Explain why simple metrics such as energy intensity (energy consumed for producing one cubic meter of water) might not be sufficient to characterize energy efficiency 3) Describe a benchmarking approach than can be used to identify particularly high and low energy facilities within a drinking water system.
