BlueTech Forum 2012 - The Water Technology Opportunity in Green Buildings, Jerry Yudelson

My name is Henrik Larson. I'm here from Grundfos. I'm here to introduce the keynote speaker during lunch here, Jerry Udelson. I think it's been a great morning and I think it's been some really great sessions. So thanks Paul for putting on a great program. I'm particularly proud of introducing Jerry since Grundfos really have a high focus on commercial buildings, buildings like we are in today, buildings which we believe over time can be upgraded to high performance buildings. And I'm really looking forward to hear what Jerry has to say about that and how new technology and particular water technologies can make commercial buildings more sustainable in the future. Jerry Udelson. He has keynoted more than 50 conferences and events since 2006 and he's the author of 2012 books spanning from Green Buildings, Water Conservation, Green Homes and Green Development, including the book Dry Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis, which I'm sure some of you have already read. He was named a lead fellow in 2011 by the US Green Building Council, USGBC in recognition of his efforts to promote green buildings into the worldwide force which it is today. And I think for some of you who are spending time here in Silicon Valley, I'm sure that commercial buildings and technologies for commercial buildings is really part of the VC and the startup community big time here in the Silicon Valley, spanning from water to energy to lights to intelligent windows. Jerry's next book, the World's Greenest Buildings Promises versus Performance in Sustainable Design, is due out later this year. Looks at energy and water performance of 50 of the world's highest rated buildings today and trying to do a benchmark on that. Jerry has trained nearly 4,000 people in LEED green building rating systems from 2001 to 2009 and he was one of the original lead trainers for the US GBC and is a former USGBC board member. His firm, ULS and Associates, based in Tucson, offers green building consulting services, corporate and institutional sustainability planning, water management and policy consultancy, lead training and contract research services. They're busy over there, Tucson. Jerry is a registered professional engineer with more than 25 years experience. He holds a degree in water resources Engineering from Caltech and Harvard University and an MBA with highest honors from the University of Oregon. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Jerry.

So thanks to Henrik and thanks to Grundfos for sponsoring this and good afternoon everyone. So somebody asked me what were my objectives as a speaker right after lunch and I said I want to see more eyeballs than eyelids. So if you would help me out, please. I'd appreciate that. I wanted to read you a poem. Poem to start things off. This is by a. Did I do something here? There we go. This is by a former or late resource economist, Kenneth Boulding, the only man ever to head both the American Economics association and the American Psychological Association. So if you think the economy's driving you crazy, Mr. Boulding got there first and so he wrote an ode on the general subject of water. Water is far from a simple commodity. Water is a sociological oddity. Water's a pasture for science to forage in. Water's a mark of our dubious origin. Water's a link with a distant futurity. Water's a symbol of ritual purity. Water is politics. Water's religion. Water is just about anyone's pigeon. Water's frightening. Water's endearing. Water's a lot more than mere engineering. Water is tragical. Water is comical. Water is far from the pure economical. So discussions of water, though free from aridity, are apt to produce a good deal of turbidity. So that's what Mr. Boulding has to say on the subject of water. And I think you'll agree from all of your experience and the discussions today that there's a lot of truth there as well. Oh, I did it again. There we go. So I wanted to talk to you, and I always like to give the takeaways first. So that way, if you, in fact, do want to take a little snooze right after lunch, you'll at least know what the talk was about and can discuss it intelligently with your friends afterwards. So a couple of key takeaways. First of all, in the green building world, water is the next big thing. The bottom line is we figured out energy. We can now design zero net energy buildings pretty much everywhere in North America. So we figured that one out and they're economical even. So now water is the next big subject to be tackled. The second sort of takeaway point is that we can use stuff that's happened all around the world, particularly in places like Australia, Israel, Netherlands, Germany, to inform what we do here. In fact, I live in Arizona, so drip irrigation is a big thing there. But, and as many of you know, the Israelis invented that 50 years ago to handle the same set of issues. A very dry climate and waters scarce. The third is, as we're all sort of gathered here to sort of find out about, there's a lot of opportunities there for all kinds of operations, manufacturers, service firms, entrepreneurs, designers, et cetera. So there's a lot of chances here to do good work and also to make good money. And when I wrote my book Dry Run, I was very interested in trying to find the niche about urban water crisis. And obviously we all know the sort of subject of water, the sort of idea that water is going to be oil of the 21st century, it's going to be the source of a lot of money and a lot of conflict, that fresh water is inherently limited, that water footprints of cities and industries are much larger than the actual water use. Global warming is having a huge impact over time on water supplies. We're seeing that in the Southwest. The Colorado river, on which seven southwestern states depends, is pretty reliably projected to have 10 to 15% less annual flows over the next few decades than we have today. And what we have today is less than what we had when it was all allocated. So we've got all these kind of issues about the easily available water, the surface water. Water and energy are also intimately connected. I've seen research from Sandia National Labs that basically says, hey, if you go out 15 years, project current trends in energy and water use, there's not enough water for energy production, not enough energy for water production and treatment. So we're going to hit the wall at some point in the next 10 to 15 years on both water and energy together. And what's interesting, of course, is that neither of these are planned with each other in mind. So if you look at our institutional arrangements, our planners, the energy planners, are off on one side. Electric utilities, natural gas companies, the water guys are over here, mostly municipal operations. They never think to talk to each other and yet they have this intimate connection, the water energy nexus. We also know that the US is very drought prone. And one of the things I could recommend, if you don't do it already, is just to sign up for Google alerts and look under water conservation as a topic. And you will see that in this year alone, there have been water emergencies, not just in the usual suspect places, Texas, the south, Southwest, but in places like Massachusetts, Michigan. There's not because there's not enough water around, but because infrastructure is inadequate to the task. So we have to deal with droughts all the way from Florida and Georgia, wet regions all the way to dry regions like the Southwest. In 2009, California was basically in lockdown for water shortages. So we're going to be faced more and more with water as a huge issue, as a cost issue. I was talking to some people last night, I said we could solve all these problems easily, but we don't have the money. For infrastructure. So I think that water planning at the municipal level, at the broad urban and industrial level, is going to really have to revert to least cost thinking, to sustainability thinking, to sort of lean manufacturing thinking in a way that has never been done before, because we simply cannot build the infrastructure for legal, political reasons as well as economic reasons. And finally, therefore, that water conservation and reuse become vital pieces of any water solution. I looked at San Diego county as one of the case studies from my book, and San Diego county is supposed to increase population by a third over the next 20 years, add another million people. San Diego is at the end of the pipeline. They're at the end of the straw, and they are in real trouble. And so when you actually look at the current plans, water reuse and conservation are the main sources of new, quote, supply in San Diego county, which is the second or third largest county in California, one of the largest in the U.S. so we're going to see lots of opportunities. But more importantly, you recall the statement from the current mayor of Chicago, Mr. Obama's first chief of staff, that never let a good crisis go to waste, right? We're going to see opportunities to do things, to change paradigms, to leapfrog approval processes that might have taken a decade or two before. We're going to see these kind of emergencies drive people to do things that they would not have thought of doing even five years ago. And so I think for people in business, this is a great opportunity, time to actually get in and present new ideas to places and institutions that you would have written off before. Simply, they'll never change the way they do things. The fact of the matter is they are being forced to. Even Las Vegas, you know, 300 gallons per person per day, 3 inches of rainfall a year. Try to make the math work. Las Vegas will pay you $1.50 a square foot to take out your lawn and replace it with desert landscaping. So they're doing everything they can to take their per capita use down to 150 gallons per person per day, which is the current US average. They're still only going to have three inches of rain, but they're in a world of hurt. They could easily disappear in 50 years as a city and be about where they were in 1946 when Bugsy Siegel of the Chicago mob found them. So you could see, if you snooze long enough, you might just not miss anything about Las Vegas. Well, let's talk about green buildings, because that's the ostensible reason for me to cavort up Here, after your lunch. Basically, green buildings have acquired a new construction, about 20%, 25% market share going up every year. 30,000 projects that are registered under the LEED system. In other words, seeking a green certification representing 9 billion square feet. Any number with a B is pretty large. And 9 billion, if you're in the metric system here, 900 million square meters. So this is a lot of stuff. 130 countries are now using the US LEED system in place of their own or as their own system, including places like Brazil and India, as well as Canada and a number of other large countries. There are 12,000 projects certified and the average size is about 100, 110,000 square feet. So a tenth of a million square feet. So if you just kind of do the math, there's a lot of stuff out there, examples for others. And about 175,000 people have been accredited as professionals to do the lead evaluations or audits. And just give that number a little perspective. That's twice the membership of the American Institute of Architects. So if you want to think about it another way, twice as many people as there are architects in the US already know about the lead system and have passed a test in it. So again, that creates the infrastructure for doing this stuff rapidly. Obviously there's inhibiting forces. Water's still cheap. If you look at building operations, compare water to energy costs. Water costs are one tenth to one fifth the cost of energy in building operations. So it hasn't gotten attention. What does get attention is when you can't get water for your building to operate it. So obviously people are thinking about it. Even though it's not a huge cost item, we still prefer high water use lifestyles. I was flying into Los Angeles on my way up here yesterday, and I grew up there, so it was no surprise. But just flying into lax, you start at the Harbor Freeway and you go from out to the west side, you see one postage stamp lot after another, right? No one's doing anything with that green except watering it. It's not really serving any great purpose, but that is how we have developed. You go to Australia. I was in Sydney a couple weeks ago. Australians use roughly 150 liters a day per person instead of gallons. And they still, I think, have a viable country. They still have lots of beer to drink and other urban amenities. So we can do a lot more with less. And so that's sort of the opportunity now for designers is to figure out how to do this with a lot less water use. But there are also unintended consequences. The first thing that happens when you do a lot of water conservation is water agency revenues go down. The second thing that happens is that all of our sewage systems, which are designed for gravity flow to be self scouring, you engineers out there have as much water in them, the stuff doesn't move. Last year, San Francisco had to spend $14 million on bleach to take care of some of their sewer problems. Where the sewer wasn't moving, of course, you could just run the fire hydrants and flush them out too, but that would kind of defeat the purpose. So there are unintended consequences of all this stuff. And so what I really believe is that we're just beginning to look at water and energy and cities as complete systems. And my slogan is it takes a system to replace a system. You can't just do it component by component. And so we're just beginning to sort of deal with this. And part of my presentation today will deal with how we're handling this at the building level. I have in your handout, at the back of one of the documents that you got in your packet, two pyramids. One is a residential oriented, the other is business oriented. But the basic idea of the pyramid was to try to show how you could think about the water supply issue and going sort of from the easiest, cheapest stuff, changing behavior. I have a 4 minute shower timer in my shower, a little hourglass, and it's good. And I've always thought, well, what would you do with teenagers who want to be in the shower for half an hour? And, and I think the only thing you can do is to have a coin op meter on the shower so at least their allowance money gets recycled, if not the water. But anyway, it goes in terms of complexity, levels of investment, up to things like desalination and other new water sources. But this might be a good heuristic tool for thinking about the water issue in the same way for business. And the bottom line is that the low cost, no cost measures are still valid to think about. Changing behavior is still valid to think about. We still have this toilet to tap problem politically in the US Every time you talk about water recycling, you go to Australia, it's not a problem. You go to Singapore, it's not a problem. But cultural issues are still there and they need to be dealt with. So I want to talk to you now about some of the new developments that are happening with on site water treatment, starting with Blackwater. There is quite a bit of action, some of it in North America, a lot in Australia, but On site water treatment is being very actively considered by building owners, developers, architects and engineers as the way to start moving towards from net zero energy to net zero water systems. And so here's a Vancouver BC Convention center which has a very large blackwater recycling system used for toilet flushing and irrigating a green roof in the four or five months a year it doesn't rain in Vancouver. And so, you know, a pretty large scale system using the sort of GE membrane bioreactor technology. I was just in Sydney visiting this building which is called 1 Bly street or 1 Blythe, and it's right in the middle of central business district. And it's now employing what is an Australian favorite called sewer mining. Because after all, if you try to have a building, a large building that's just 30 stories with cooling towers, you quickly realize there's not enough water use in the building for the cooling tower makeup. So the obvious solution is to find it in the middle of the street, pipe the water in from the sewer. It's actually better quality than the water that's coming out of the toilets in the building, A lot less paper and bring it back into the building, treat it, use it for evaporative purposes and cooling tower makeup, and essentially get your cooling tower to zero net water use. And for most buildings like this, the cooling tower will be 30 to 50% of the total water use. And so there's been a lot of focus in the green building movement on the fixtures, low flow urinals, water free urinals, low flush toilets, faucet aerators, all that stuff. But everyone's been in the position of the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost. Do you know that story? He's on his knees looking under the lamppost, dropped my keys here somewhere. And a cop comes along and says, what are you doing? Looking for my car key so I can drive home. He says, well, where'd you lose them? Well, I lost them over there. How come you look in here? This is where the light is. So we're looking for water savings, like love in all the wrong places, right? And so sewer mining is starting to come in and obviously 10 million dogs can't be wrong. What usually happens though, is when you start using reclaimed wastewater on site for toilet flushing, the health authorities always make you put a sign above the toilet that says, reclaim water. Do not drink. And so the only creatures that would drink obviously can't read, except for those of us who may have prayed to the porcelain goddess while we were in college on a few Occasions, but that's neither here nor there. There's a lot of interest in gray water. So here's a nice German product. One of the issues when you deal with offices and commercial buildings is you have to handle intermittent flows. You don't get constant flows like you might with an industrial system or a municipal system. And so this is a really nice product by Hans Grohe, which is a big plumbing company. I just thought I'd show it to you. I actually visited their factory in southwestern Germany and these can be ganged up in four and a half cubic meter per day units. I've seen this at a large bank building in Frankfort, a super green building. They do work. They work just fine. And you might want to be treating the gray water separately just because it's so different in concentration. In fact, what they told me in Sydney was we don't want to treat the gray water because it dilutes all the black water and makes things much harder to treat. Another technology which is totally different is Living Machines by Worrell Water Technologies, which is actually a biological treatment system based on a theory of treating water as you would in tidal cycles. So the water actually cycles up and down, you grow plants on top and you actually come up with a very nice looking product. This is the Port of Portland headquarters at Portland International Airport. You can go in here and actually look at this. And so all the plumbing is down below, but the actual treatment is taking place in the lobby for about 200 employees. Wastewater in that building. This is a real nice unit. They've had a few startup problems. Somebody mentioned just before lunch in one of the talks that labor is the big cost. Here's in a lot of these systems. And so they've actually now engaged a maintenance firm that actually comes out every week, takes water samples, checks everything out because you can't leave these unattended. So that's a really nice product. These are going in San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, if you want to look at their new offices downtown San Francisco has a system like this on the ground floor. So here's another idea for essentially creating landscape architecture with wastewater treatment. So what are the opportunities? In researching my book, I actually found one company in Florida that was doing Esco financing, energy service company financing, for retrofitting older office buildings. So if you want to look in a lot of older offices in most cities, you're going to find five gallon per flush toilets, three and a half gallon per flush toilets. And so there's an opportunity there to go raise some money and install low Fixture toilets and get paid essentially out of the savings, which is the same kind of program that Johnson Control, Siemens, Honeywell and a lot of companies are doing. On the energy side, you just have to pick your targets. Well, a lot of opportunities in systems for rainwater harvesting, which is a big issue in a lot of eastern cities in the US where you have combined sewer overflows. So you have restrictions on new development because of rainwater issues. So there's a lot more focus on both building scale, neighborhood scale and district scale. Rainwater harvesting systems, rainwater detention retention systems, gray water on site, black water, and then applications for things like cooling towers. And a gentleman here I know has the micro turbines for taking care of some of the plumbing issues. I've worked a lot with mechanical, electrical, plumbing engineering firms and I know that retraining the plumbing engineers is not going to be easy because it's a handbook based business. So somehow you got to get in and redo all the handbooks. But the key here is, and you can see from the diagram on the left, the key is to really match the quality of water supply to the end use requirements. And I think that's sort of a key conceptual tool. If you look at our current system, our objective is to take drinking water and pollute it and send it out to the public authorities to treat. Right. That's our current system. We flush toilets and urinals with drinking water. Doesn't make a lot of sense. It's not the quality requirement for the end use. So trying to match quality with supply is really a key concept here. There's a lot of training that's been going on for green plumbing design water audits. I've had this done on my home where you try to match the overall input to the end use requirements. Kind of top up, bottom down analysis. A lot of opportunities in building fixture retrofits. In fact, if President Obama had really wanted shovel ready projects, and we know what was this shoveled for the most part. But if you really wanted shovel ready projects, redoing the plumbing in America would have been a great one to use. You don't need a high skill level and they're all out there to be handled. But somehow we got into big projects that never really got off the ground. New water. So Singapore, many people here know about Singapore's new water program. I visited the barrage there where they actually are putting treated wastewater back directly into water supply reservoirs. Here we do it through the groundwater. But what I like best about Singapore is branding as new water. I thought that's Extremely clever and a great way to sell it to the public. And it's something you can do if you run a benign authoritarian state, it's a bit easier. Or in Australia, where you have a parliamentary system, so there's only one point of authority, the Prime Minister, and not a Congress and a president. So we have a little more challenges here, but we can do it. Subspecialties integrating all this into the cloud. So understanding and monitoring what's going on in buildings, finding leaks. I was in Sydney 2009 researching my book and I read a report from Sydney Water. 30% of all water delivered to office buildings is lost to leak leaks. I'm thinking to myself, why would you build a $1.7 billion desalination system when for I'm guessing one tenth that price, you could have gotten twice as much water just from repairing leaks. There's a mentality issue here that is we're not tracing everything. We really need a CSI water show where people trace the water crimes back to the obvious perpetrators. So hopefully somebody in the audience will be clever enough to sort of sell that script to Hollywood and we can get on to some more interesting work than just another crime of passion. And obviously challenges. You have to do your homework, you have to position properly, you have to deal with the fact that most of your clients have been in this business for years, have seen everything, have been pitched everything, and you want to show them something new. And it's hard. Lots of new products coming to market. So I've seen this in the building control space. I've been working with an Australian company and an Atlanta based company for the last three years on some building control software, cloud based products. And just in that one little niche market, we've seen dozens of companies come in as competitors that you could not have predicted four years ago. So lots of things happening and then larger questions of benefits and costs. Who's going to pay for it? That old question. And is it going to work long term? As a trained civil engineer and as somebody who realizes that we don't worry about cholera in the US and in the western developed countries, I don't want to trade that hundred years of public health achievement for the short term hit of reducing building water use. So we really have to make sure that once this stuff goes in, it's maintained and it actually works. And so there has to be things like a sinking fund for replacement and repairs the same way you would have in a municipality where they can sell revenue bonds for their repairs. You can't do that in a building. So there's still some unanswered questions about what scale should this happen should happen the building scale, neighborhood scale, district scale. But one thing is sure, it's going to happen at less than the municipal scale. And I think that's a key thing to understand. And so where does this leave investors? A very dynamic and hopefully profitable future. Water shortages are real, permanent and growing. I live in Tucson. I will tell you that people in Arizona are real worried about water. If you have a new residential development of any size, you have to demonstrate there's 100 year supply of water for that development. You don't have to do that in California. Tucson gets 12 inches of rain a year, the same as San Diego. Tucson water restrictions are much more stringent than San Diego. You can't build a new apartment building with a lawn in Tucson. If you build a new home in Tucson, you have to stub it out for gray water recovery. Because I recover greywater in my house, but all I can get is a washing machine. Because by the time I want to get the sinks in the showers, it's already been mixed with sewage. Because in the west we're all slab on grade plumbing, right? Plumbing's in the slab. So again, little things can be done institutionally to really change dynamics, new laws and regulations. One of the things I think you're going to see in California, laws for retrofit upon resale for residential and commercial properties. Hey, you got a three and a half gallon per flush toilet, it's going to be 1.12 before you can sell it. So things like that are going to come in. Increasing block rate structures will raise prices and costs. So you can look at costs for water going up 10 to 15% a year in most cities. So that means factor that into your business plan. Mandates are coming. Certain things are simply not going to be allowed anymore. You're not going to be allowed to run the sprinklers on your lawn in Los Angeles when it's raining. I grew up in Los Angeles and that's one of the sort of indelible remembrances of my childhood is like, why are the sprinklers running? It's raining. But they are because they're on a timer. And I think the favor is going to be on larger scale systems than just the building level. But we'll have to see how that plays out. So larger question, should we abandon the centralized treatment and distribution model? Should we still flush toilets with potable water? Testing and certification is going to be a big issue. So there's an outfit in Canada that tests most of the low flow toilets that are inducing in the market. They use miso soybean paste as a substitute for the real thing. But it does work, has about the right specific gravity and so forth. And are we going to have state by state battles or national solutions? And I think the answer in the US is we're going to do it state by state. We just simply have too big a country to do it all at once. And so I think what you're going to see is a whole variety of test bed states out there for greywater, which now in 17 states is an alternative compliance path in the plumbing code. It's not even an exception or variance, it's just an alternative path. You're going to see things like that happen. So a lot of your analysis, market analysis is going to have to be geographical in scope. Well, the future is green and blue, but if you're going to score, you have to run to where the ball is headed. This is one of my favorite sports photos. This is the winning kick in overtime in the World Cup. Some of you may have seen that if I showed this in Europe, everybody would recognize it. But this is European football. How will buildings use water in 2015, 2020? How will building owners and managers want to use water? What will be the next normal? And will water wasting buildings and homes pay a market penalty as energy wasting buildings and homes do today? So that is what we have to say. Let's stay in touch. Thank you very much. So do we still have a few minutes for questions? Paul? Okay, so I'm entertaining questions. The question basically is how adaptable are different ways of doing things. I think if you're going from a water based system to a dry system is not going to be easy. If you want to see a dry system starting about November, you can go visit the Bullitt foundation center in Seattle, which would be the largest net zero commercial building, 50,000 square feet for lease space with composting toilets. So you could see that in Sweden and other places in Europe there's urine diverting toilets where you're taking urine into fertilizer. This stuff is a hard sell. So I think what you're going to see inside the home is more on the fixture side, water efficient appliances. Some Japanese clothes washers now use no water, just use ultrasound for cleaning. There's going to be a lot of innovation in the fixture and appliance space and I think a lot of emphasis on water conservation outside the home. So to become an EPA branded WaterSense home now you have to cut outdoor irrigation use by 40%. So some builders in dry regions are starting to latch onto the EPA WaterSense program for commercial buildings. You pretty much got to make a decision going in how you're going to do it. If you're going to do on site waste treatment, on site black water treatment, you pretty much need to have it plumbed in from the beginning, particularly if you're going to take the treated water back for toilet flushing. So you have to have dual plumbing. So there's a whole bunch of things you have to think about from the beginning. I think outside the building it's easier to think about other approaches, but inside you pretty much got to decide from the beginning and you have to think holistically about this one thing. I didn't mention that sort of water energy nexus. Many people have heard this statistic. But for those of you from outside of California, almost 1/5, 20% of California's electricity use goes for moving water or treating water. A third of California's natural gas use goes for heating water. So the water energy connection. It turns out that water conservation is the cheapest form of energy conservation. So there's a policy reason for really pushing it. It's about a third the cost of insulating your attic on a kilowatt hour save basis. So there's going to be a lot of policy push here as well as economic push. Other questions. Did I get close to answering your question? The answer is it's not easy to have the same flexibility that you might have on electricity. You could switch from this kind of lighting to LED lighting without too many problems. But it's different on water.

You talk about the energy water nexus, but what do you think about the food water nexus? Because the majority of the water goes to the food production, but all the food in the end ends up in the toilets. And have one way or the other go back to the agriculture again if you want to have a cycle.

I think we have an exhibitor here that will take all of that food, waste biosolids and make energy out of it. Right? So not make fertilizer. So I think the right number in California is about half of the wastewater solids in California are returned to farmland today. The problem is it's a huge trucking business. You can get about 20 tons in each truck. You just do the math. And you got trucks moving 24,7 from the wastewater treatment plants back to the farms. That's not a real efficient system. But the fact is all the wastewater treatment plans are downstream, right? The farms are upstream so we haven't really figured that one out. But putting biosolids back on farmland is complicated because of everything that's in the wastewater, all the trace elements, pharmaceuticals, et cetera. So there's some significant issues there. But closing the loop makes a lot of sense long term. And obviously as the world moves more towards animal protein, water use for food is going to go up dramatically. And I was in Doha two years ago and I met with the Minister of Food Security. You're going to begin to see more and more countries have ministerial level food security operations because just getting enough food in Doha, they can buy it. They've got the eighth largest supply of natural gas in the world, but they're three fourths of the population is expats. If they run out of food, the whole economy collapses. Everyone leaves right on the next plane or boat. So food security, Singapore, huge issue. Water security, huge issue. So these are national level political issues that I think are going to drive innovation independent of all the business issues. And obviously sustainability concerns, concerns about water footprints in industry, many, many things are acting to push this industry forward. You know, in the 70s I went into the energy business as a young engineer because even though I was trained in water, I didn't think anything would happen in the water field. And now in the last half decade, you've all seen how much drama has come into this field which wasn't there in the year 2000. So I think it's an exciting time to be here. But we still haven't dealt with long term sustainability. Europeans haven't. They talk about it, but if you actually look at the numbers, the most viable European scheme is to put solar panels all over the Sahara desert, put high voltage cables under the Mediterranean and bring all the power back into Europe. Right. So that's the scheme question. And back. Hi, Jerry.

Sorry, Jerry. It's not so much a question, it's just when you referred back to as a foreigner living in the United States, I mean, and particularly living in California.

And what country would you be from, mate?

I think I said to somebody else this morning, here, I think I'm surrounded by Irish people. This whole thing seems to be, seems to be full of Irish people. Yeah, but one of the things that, one of, one of the notable points you just touched on, which has bothered me since I moved here, was when you look at the fact that they're still heating water, despite the fact that gas is so cheap in California, they're still heating their hot water using gas. And yet in a country like Ireland, we mandated that all new homes must produce 15% of their energy on site by a renewable resource. And the reason why they picked 15% was because typically heating water is 15% of the energy demand of the building. And a country like Ireland, any of you have been there, know what kind of climate we have, can actually mandate that as being a requirement. It seems absolutely implausible. The state of California still allows buildings to be built for them to actually heat their water from gas. And the other point about which I think goes back to the first question was the actual cost in a new build of making the building capable of handling grey water reusage and rainwater. And rainwater harvesting is virtually negligible. And the overall cost of a house if it's done at the beginning. So the question really comes down to where's the political will to actually say to people? I know Americans are so anti being told to do something even when it's the right thing to do. But it's, you know, there are a lot of very simple solutions out there. If somebody actually had the wherewithal to take the political will to push it.

Well, you know, it's always interesting to see yourself with other people's eyes. And I do think, as Winston Churchill once said, Americans always do the right thing after they've tried everything else. So we're sort of slowly groping our way politically towards some of these solutions. You know, there are these test bed cities like Tucson, interestingly enough, compare Tucson to Phoenix, two cities 100 miles apart in the same desert. Phoenix still flood irrigates lawns with water deliveries a couple times a week. And you can actually see this, the older parts of Phoenix, the sidewalk is this much higher than the lawn so that when the water deliveries come, they can pond and gradually go into the lawn. So if you can do that in the Sonoran Desert, hey, you can send a man to the moon or something. That's our thinking. The fact is water shortages concerns about water are going to drive change dramatically at the political level. Every politician wants to have a solution in hand when a crisis hits. So it's our job as water advocates to give them those solutions technologically, behaviorally. If you looked at Australia, what I found really interesting studying the Australian drought response, 2005, 2010, worst drought in their recorded history. In Perth, the reservoir inflows were 80% less than historical levels. Can you imagine living with that in a modern city isolated from the rest of the world like Perth? But what really worked in Australia was getting a public buy in everybody. And Australia is a Kind of an island, if you will. It's a continent, but there's an island mentality. We're all in this together and I think that's what's missing in the US and so that getting the public buy in was critical to the Australian drought response, getting people to stop watering lawns. If you wash your car, you do it with a shut off valve. I mean these are really simple things. And so it's sometimes it's neighbor to neighbor. I live in a neighborhood where everybody recycles with blue garbage cans. How many people have that kind of thing? It's all over Canada for sure. And I'm convinced that half of my neighbors put out their recycled cans with nothing in them just to show that they're also good citizens. So there's a lot that we can do neighbor to neighbor and in towns. And I think that's the way things are going to happen. Yeah, so what he said is true. I also tell you I had 15 years ago, I spent a good part of a year trying to get biosol's approval for farmland in southeastern California. And politically it's still a hard sell. So yeah, what you say is true. EPA has regulated this pretty well over the last 15 years. So biosalids land application is a viable solution. It's used all over the country. It's harder, it's easier to use in drier regions than wetter regions because you just have so many months a year you can't land apply. So there's definitely opportunities. So you should be doing energy recovery as well as farm applications.

Jerry, you've got the room thinking, talking, you've definitely stimulated debate.

This is the host. I must bow to the hook that's coming out for this vaudeville act.

I think just my job is to try and keep it on time and I think otherwise. I think there's enough interest here, enough debate that we could stay here for another half an hour. So I'd like you to chat perhaps during the networking breaks and put a hand together to thank Jerry.