University of Texas at Austin
OP-26: Water Use

FY and CY 2009 have been adopted as baseline years by the Vice President of University Operations and Associate Vice President of Campus Planning as part of the Natural Resources Conservation Plan, an evolving document that supports resource consumption planning for the entire Operations portfolio.

Currently most of our non-potable reclaimed water is used in our cooling towers so that we need less potable water to operate those facilities. As we are in a cooling climate, we feel that this is a very important use of our current amount of reclaimed water.   UT has had an active water recovery program, coordinated by Utilities and Energy Management, since 1981. Composed of reclaimed groundwater, air conditioning condensate, swimming pool water, and cooling water from hundreds of different pieces of research equipment throughout the campus, the recovered water is pumped to the campus cooling towers where it displaces potable water for evaporative loss make-up.   The program recovers an average 3.5 million gallons a month, representing about 5% of the University's total water consumption and about 26% of cooling water demand. As of 2007, the water recovery program has recycled more than 1.35 billion gallons of water, for a total savings of approximately $7,500,000. From 1982 through 1999, while UT conditioned space increased by approximately 2 million square feet, campus-wide water consumption actually dropped by 100 million gallons. The program continues to be cited in many symposia and professional workshop presentations to state, industry and private sector professionals as a model of industrial conservation.

UT Austin has installed more 160 water meters around campus. These are fully automated and have real-time consumption brought into a centralized server. Once the server captures the meter data, a client (IWS) application stores it in a database, and displays it in an HMI (Human machine interface). The data from each meter consists mainly of four variables; Current and Previous Month consumption (CM, PM) in gallons, and Current and Previous Day consumption (CD, PD) also in gallons. This data can also be trended for analysis purposes using the same IWS application where a user can also export it into excel. There is also an alarming feature in IWS where the technicians are constantly advise when a meter consumption is out of the historical norm. The meters send out electrical “pulses” per number of gallons of water, these pulses are counted in the plc (programmable logic controller) and totalized for consumption, then the server gathers this data and IWS is then utilized as described above. EBS, which is another client of the server, acts in a similar fashion as IWS, but only displays and stores Previous Month (PM) values for billing purposes.

The first phase of UTakeCharge demand-side energy management and conservation projects included water conservation retrofits that were launched in July 2008 and completed by the end of January 2009. These projects replaced, repaired or installed 5,941 plumbing fixtures, including aerators, showerheads, urinals, toilet valves and tanks and bowls. The projected savings per year were 60 million gallons of water, 288,000 kWh and 246,000 pounds of carbon through saved pumping power, for a total estimated cost savings of $572,000. Annual water savings equates to a one-year supply of water for 831 local, average-size homes.

When areas are replanted we use only native or low water use plants that are adaptive to the Central Texas Region.