Volume 7 Issue 4 April 2020
A large water provider like Arizona’s Salt River Project (SRP) uses canals to get water from storage facilities to users. That seems simple enough, but it is only half the story. This month’s issue of Municipal Water Leader brings you the other half. In our cover interview with SRP Manager of Field Consulting Services […]
How SRP’s Infrastructure Became a Public Relations Tool
The Salt River Project (SRP) is a major utility that providesboth electrical power and water to a combined count of a littleover a million customers in the Phoenix, Arizona, region. SRPmanages 131miles of Bureau of Reclamation–owned major canalsand more than 1,000miles of laterals. This infrastructure—whichtraverses heavily populated urban areas—provides an unexpectedresource for public relations. SRP […]
Volume 7 Issue 3 March 2020
Dam safety is a topic of critical importance. Dam failures can cause death and destruction on a devastating scale. Even if they do not take human lives, they can cause evacuations, damage property, and knock out local industries that rely on steady water supplies, not to mention cost millions of dollars in repairs. In […]
AECOM’s Holistic Solutions to Cities’ Water, Waste, and Energy Problems
AECOM is one of the largest consulting companies in the world, and works with major companies and municipalities to design, finance, build, and operate transportation, water, and energy infrastructure. Its immense spectrum of activities means that it can often find innovative solutions to big problems by integrating solutions from a number of its divisions. For […]
Implementing Oceanus’s Pumped Storage- Desal Plant in Chile
Desalination plants typically deal with two major problems: the desalination process requires a large amount of energy, and it results in a large amount of brine, which is difficult to dispose of safely. Oceanus Power & Water has come up with an innovative solution to this problem: combining a pumped storage facility, which stores power […]
Columbia Basin Hydropower’s Major Pumped Storage Plans
Across the Pacific Northwest and California, coal- and gas-fired thermal combustion power plants are being retired and replaced by renewable wind and solar power facilities. This environmentally friendly policy, however, is causing a logistical problem. The intermittent nature of wind and solar generation threatens to result in a 7,500–10,000 megawatt (MW) shortfall in power generation […]
Bonneville Power Administration: The Backbone of the Pacific Northwest Grid
The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is a nonprofit federal power marketing administration based in the Pacific Northwest that is congressionally mandated to market and transmit the power created by all the federally owned hydroelectric projects on the Columbia River. BPA has marketing responsibility for 31 dams as well as the Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant. […]
Eastern Municipal Water District’s Solar Initiative
Eastern Municipal Water District (EMWD) provides water, wastewater, and recycled water to more than 825,000 people in Riverside County, California, and in so doing uses more than 100 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy a year. In order to save money, diversify its energy portfolio, and reduce emissions, EMWD is moving forward with an ambitious set […]
Emrgy: Turning Canals Into Hydropower Installations
Solar and wind power have exploded in popularity in recent years as facilities have become cheaper to build, but up until now, this has not been true of a third renewable power source, hydropower. This is primarily because hydropower relies on large installations that require civil construction. Atlanta-based Emrgy is seeking to change all this […]
Volume 7 Issue 2 February 2020
Transporting, delivering, cleaning, and treating massive quantities of water requires a lot of energy. Yet it also provides many opportunities for recovering energy, deriving energy from renewable sources, and achieving energy use efficiencies. Renewable energy is a perfect fit for many municipal water and wastewater agencies. In this issue of Municipal Water Leader, we […]