By James Rincon

Pflag Reporter

After a year of mandatory water restrictions, and with the imminent arrival of a water-hogging data center, city officials are giving serious thought to developing a water reuse program that could increase the city’s water capacity by more than 3 million gallons per day.

Assistant City Manager Tom Word presented at a Jan. 24 work session that concluded with City Council directing city staff to develop a master plan for a water reuse program as soon as possible, meaning one could go before Council for approval as early as Feb. 14.

“Finding new sources of water is becoming more and more difficult as the region grows and there is more competition for the water,” Word said. “By using reuse water, we can add to the supply of water that we already have by the amount of reuse we can put in place.”

Reuse water is wastewater from bathroom sinks, toilets, bath tubs, shower drains and washing machine drains that can be recycled for landscaping and industrial purposes.

The city’s wastewater treatment plant already supplied reuse water to Pflugerville’s community garden and to Travis County’s Northeast Metropolitan Park to water the athletic fields at a cheaper rate than if it were to use potable water.  Pflugerville Community Development Corporation is also laying the groundwork to furnish reuse water for the tenants of its Renewable Energy Business Park.

Word listed some of the advantages to providing reuse water in the city, first among them the fact that the program would increase the municipal water supply while diminishing the need to purchase additional raw water.

Pflugerville currently pays the Lower Colorado River Authority $460 per million gallons of raw water per day. The city also buys high-quality treated water from Manville Water Supply Corp. at a rate of $3,250 per million gallons per day.

As is, the city’s wastewater treatment plant could produce 3.2 million gallons of reuse water per day, Word said, that could save the city up to $537,000 a year in water costs.

With summers like last year’s thrusting virtually the entire state into extreme drought, Pflugerville’s population continues to climb. For Pflugerville to continue its steady growth, Word said the city will have to keep up with the growing demand – a demand that will jump significantly when the WindData data storage center comes on line.

When fully constructed, the data center will use 1.25 million gallons of water each day in its chilling towers, Word said, meaning WindData alone would use 39 percent of the city’s current reuse water capacity, and there is rumor that more data centers may be headed to Pflugerville.

A reuse program would deter those projects from using the city’s potable water to cool their servers, but building the infrastructure to support the reuse program won’t be cheap.

“You’ll have to run pipes over five miles, build elevated storage, pump it up a lot of height for 250,000 gallons a day – that’s a $9 million investment in capital,” Word said.

Although the city would stand to incur costs for the program, Word said its addition to the water base would push back the cost of building another wastewater treatment plant when the current one hits capacity.

“The number of customers we have in our community grows over time, so the actual impact to the rates of those individuals over time is spread over a larger group of people,” Word said. “So this can have a very beneficial impact on our regular household water users.”

Other arguments for the program, Word said, are that it is a green initiative, in line with the city’s emerging trend as a green technology leader, and it enhances the city’s reliability in times of drought.

“I don’t care if we get 30 inches of rain a year or 10 inches of rain a year, everybody still washes dishes,” Word said. “So it’s a very sustainable supply, even in drought conditions.”

Lastly, Word told Council that a water reuse program can provide economic growth opportunities.

“If we’re smart about how we do reuse and how we implement a reuse program and the capital costs associated with the reuse program, we can provide lower cost water, sometimes in very large quantities, to specific users, industrial users.”

Word said if the city could find multiple major users of the reuse water supply and strategically locate them within 2 miles of the treatment plant, the program would be optimized and its monetary impact of the city and its residents would be minimized.

“If you hang other users off of that pipeline, the cost [of service] goes down,” Word said. “It would appear that the optimal plan for this would be to locate users along Pecan [Street] and to extend lines up 130.”

WindData’s future location at the city’s northern boundary line is not ideal Word said, but City Manager Brandon Wade said his staff is looking into alternative ways to serve the data center, including possibly partnering with Round Rock, which is also in the burgeoning stages of a water reuse program.

Brad Marshall said the City Council fully supports the program’s development.

“Because it’s an unregulated territory now, it’s only a matter of time until that changes,” Marshall said. “We need to be taking fairly aggressive steps.”