Yesterday, February 12, 2009 was a worldwide Twestival for Clean Drinking Water. This was where people who use Twitter to communicate with each other, got together in over 175 cities worldwide to raise money for clean drinking water initiatives. Cheetah Learning raised $2300 for Clean Drinking Water by donating 5% of revenues made for the day from their Twestival activities to teach people how to do project management for clean drinking water projects.

Obtaining clean drinking water requires power. It requires the power to get the water up from the ground and it requires power to make sure the drinking water is free from disease producing microorganisms. One of the ways to better insure that there is adequate clean drinking water is to adequately process waste water. This takes even more power. Yes you can use some low power methods to adequately process waste water, but modern day methods that insure far better processing for preserving clean water requires tremendous electricity.

The Hill Canyon Waste Water Treatment Facility in Thousand Oaks, CA uses solar power and methane to power it’s waste water treatment facility.

The solar power system cost $1.5 million to install and produces about 15% of the treatment centers power. The solar power system is owned by Renewable Ventures/MMA and sells electricity to Hill Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant for 16.8 cents/kW. The methane system uses methane gas from the facility’s anaerobic digesters to power (2) 250 kW generators. This system cost $.5m (1/3 the cost of the solar system) and provides approximately 45% of the facility’s energy needs. This system is owned and operated by U.S. Energy. The Hill Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant purchases this electricity at a rate of 6.4 cents/kW.

This is very interesting that the methane system cost 1/3 as much as the solar system and produces 3 times the electricity. What I love about this story is that it is the waste they are processing that creates the largest percentage of electricity to process that waste.

The inverse relationship between money spent on the system vs. the energy produced appears to be a universal truth as I have seen it in existence in many other realms. The engineers perpetual question is - how can I spend the least amount of money and get the maximum energy out. The engineers managing the Thousand Oaks facility are doing a fantastic job with answering this question.