Live Radio
photo credit: Courtesy of the Town of WindsorWindsor's wastewater treatment plant.
The Town of Windsor has reached a major milestone: 100% of the community’s wastewater is now recycled and reused.
Since 2019, Windsor staff have been working toward long-term sustainability goals at the town's water treatment plant.
Until recently, treated water from the plant would go one of three places:
"We were sending about a third of the water to the Geysers," said Shannon Cotulla, director of public works for the Town of Windsor, referring to the world's largest geothermal field on the border of Sonoma and Lake counties.
Cotulla continued, "a third would be used for irrigation, and the other third would discharge into Mark West Creek, and Laguna de Santa Rosa, and then into the Russian River."
It's that last third that now gets captured and reused, thanks to an agreement with Sonoma Water.
"[Sonoma Water's] Airport/Larkfield/Wikiup Sanitation Zone needed about $50 million dollars' worth of renovations," said Cotulla. "But that system was wholly reliant on irrigation, they didn't have a discharge permit, so they had a lot of storage."
About 300 million gallons of storage, in fact.
"So by being able to consolidate the two treatment operations together, we gain enough storage to avoid surface discharges, and they avoid $50 million dollars worth of wastewater treatment plant renovations," said Cotulla.
Essentially, Windsor agrees to handle all the wastewater
And because the storage is now jointly managed, Windsor avoids having to discharge wastewater into Mark West Creek and the Russian River Basin. Instead, they now provide fully treated recycled water for irrigation of parks, public spaces and golf courses, as well as water for power generation at the Geysers.
The idea for consolidating the two systems has been around for a while.
"It doesn't make any sense to have two wastewater treatment operations within a little over a mile of each other," Cotulla said. "But it really worked out that both agencies saw this as beneficial for the environment, for recycling water and water supplies in the region, beneficial for the customers not to have to bear that additional $50 million dollars in cost. It just made sense at every level and it happened relatively rapidly once we all got on the same page."
According to Cotulla, the consolidation itself was fairly inexpensive and straight forward.
"Turns out Sonoma Water had capital reserves, and one of the things we had to do was build an interconnection pipeline that cost around a million dollars," Cotulla said. "But, they funded that interconnection capital cost. We actually designed and built it in Windsor, and that's what allowed really the full operation of the consolidation to happen."
Windsor now receives the revenues from Airport/Larkfield/Wikiup Sanitation Zone ratepayers and that helps offset the costs of upgrading Windsor's system to continue collecting and processing the additional wastewater, according to Cotulla.
