Close attention to details cuts power costs for TMWA

Managers of Truckee Meadows Water Authority estimate that that they've cut the utility's electricity bills by more than $500,000 a year.

The cost: Mostly a matter of paying close attention, says Ryan Dixon, water operations supervisor for the utility.

While it's a quasi-governmental agency, TMWA has been caught in the same downdraft as much of the private sector in northern Nevada. For six consecutive years, water consumption the sales that drive TMWA's finances have declined as houses sit vacant and homeowners squeeze pennies.

"We've felt the squeeze of the economy," Dixon says.

But the notion of looking closely at power bills, one of the single largest expenses of the water authority, didn't come naturally to an organization that had been owned by Sierra Pacific Power from the time of its inception in the late 1800s until it was sold to the newly created TMWA in 2001.

TMWA's staff first focused on power use at the Chalk Bluff Water Plant, the facility near the Truckee River just west of McCarran Boulevard in west Reno that meets most of its demand.

Like most commercial and industrial power users, TMWA pays differing rates throughout the hours of the day for the power that drives Chalk Bluff.

TMWA began looking for ways to shift power use from high-cost times of the day the early evening hours, for instance into the early morning hours where costs are lowest. And they worked to reduce the spikes in electric demand that drove rates higher, even if the spikes lasted no more than a few minutes.

"We've tried to hold a flat line on our production," says Dixon.

Armed with the data, the Chalk Bluffs management team was given targets not hard-and-fast rules, but targets for the facility's power consumption. The use of targets, Dixon says, allowed staff the flexibility to meet the community's water demand without worrying about stringent internal rules.

The upshot: An estimated $225,000 annual reduction in power bills.

"It was worth the exercise," says Dixon.

In the meantime, TMWA managers were looking at ways that Mother Nature could help the energy-conservation effort. It turns out she could play a big role.

Water arrives at the Chalk Bluffs Plant from one of two routes traveling down the gravity-fed Highland Ditch, or arriving via pumps from the Orr Ditch diversion ditch.

Gravity is free. Pumping costs of $70 per million gallons of water translated into an expense of $5,000 a day when water is drawn from the Orr Ditch system.

Improvement of the Highland Ditch after a 2008 earthquake caused damage allows TMWA to draw 70 million gallons of day the usual production of Chalk Bluffs from the ditch. And knowing the potential savings from use of the gravity-fed ditch, TMWA managers paid closer to attention to steps such as ice removal that otherwise might have caused the Orr Ditch pumps to be turned on.

A third bunch of low-hanging fruit, Dixon says, was found in the approximately 100 pumping stations used by TMWA to deliver water across a rolling topography that stretches from Somersett to South Meadows.

Because many points on the TMWA system can be served by two or more pumping stations, the water authority's staff undertook a complex analysis of the most efficient ways to serve neighborhoods, then incorporated this into operating plans.

Between greater attention to use of the gravity-fed Highland Ditch and the analysis of pumping efficiencies, Dixon says TMWA brought total savings to close to $500,000 annually.

Next up: TMWA hopes to use the smart-meter technology that's being rolled out by NV Energy to compare the efficiency of each of the electric motors in the pumping stations, allowing TMWA to focus even further on reduction of costs.