How D.C.’s Sewage Will Soon Generate Electricity

CREDIT: PoShutterstock

Potomac River, Washington D.C.



So while the existence of human-caused climate change is alternatively debated, scoffed at and ignored elsewhere in the nation’s capital, the D.C. Water Authority is investing millions into projects to protect a city’s water from sea level rise, storm surge, and the type of destruction brought by Superstorm Sandy.





“At the turn of the century, we looked at wastewater just as a public health issue, it was all about keeping people from getting sick” said Lauren Fillmore, Senior Program Director at the nonprofit Water Environment Research Foundation. “And then in the 1970s, with the Clean Water Act, we started dealing with everything else in the water besides pathogens that was damaging the environment. Now, we are just starting to look at wastewater management as really water resource recovery.”

Longer term, there are also plans being considered to install 50 acres of solar panels on top of the Blue Plains treatment plant. The solar panels could generate an additional 8 megawatts of electricity. D.C. Water is currently the largest consumer of electricity in the District.

Elsewhere in the country, the Philadelphia Water Department is using heat recovery technology and anaerobic digesters to reduce its reliance on the grid. In Gloversville-Johnstown, New York, a small wastewater treatment plant not only uses a digester to generate energy from its own biosolids, it takes the waste byproducts of a yogurt producer nearby and generates energy from them too. There are similar projects at wastewater facilities in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Ithaca, New York, and Oakland, California.

“In terms of climate readiness, it doesn’t get any more basic than protecting water,” said Fillmore. “And D.C. Water is really leading the nation in making the most of the opportunities preparing for the future provides, to become better at what they do.”