MANAGER’S CORNER
www.ca-nv-awwa.org 41
monia. AWWA has urged consideration
of the water sector’s exceptional safety re-cord
during ongoing discussions with the
administration regarding the final rule.
Lead and Copper Rule
USEPA continues to target 2017 for
publication of a proposed rule. Last Oc-tober,
the agency indicated that it is un-dertaking
a complete re-evaluation of the
rule with a focus on minimizing exposure
to lead, developing clear enforceable re-quirements,
assuring transparency with
the public as a particular focus, avoiding
disproportionate impacts, and integrat-ing
drinking water with lead reduction in
other media.
Perchlorate
The Natural Resources Defense Council
(NRDC) filed suit in February 2016, seek-ing
declaratory and injunctive relief to
force USEPA to promulgate its proposed
perchlorate rule. Following the 2011 regu-latory
determination to proceed with de-veloping
a maximum contaminant level
goal (MCLG) for perchlorate, the statutory
deadline to propose a rule was February
2013. Last October, USEPA settled with
NRDC and agreed to a specific schedule
for promulgating a proposed rule by Octo-ber
17, 2018 and a final rule by December
17, 2019. As a condition of the settlement,
USEPA agreed to complete, by October
2017, the peer review process it initiated
to evaluate the efficacy of a health effects
model and subsequently how this may in-form
the development of an MCLG.
Energy-Water Nexus
The Water Research Foundation and
the Electric Power Research Institute esti-mate
that water and wastewater utilities
directly consume a minimum of two per-cent
of the electricity in this country. The
percentage is thought to be much higher
in California because of the distance water
travels from source to consumer coupled
with extensive groundwater pumping in
some areas.
Because water and energy are interde-pendent
such that increasing efficiency in
one usually equals efficiency in the other,
AWWA, its sections, and individual local
members have been interacting with fed-eral
programs such as Better Plants and
the U.S. Department of Energy’s Uniform
Methods Project as well as state energy
efficiency programs. In California, we are
assisting the electric companies in devel-oping
energy efficiency measures that tar-get
the water sector and we are using the
California Public Utility Commission’s En-ergy-
Water Nexus Calculator to save ener-gy
by saving water. If this effort is success-ful,
this model could be used by energy
efficiency programs in other states to help
offset the cost of efficiency measures in the
water sector.
With nearly $7 billion a year being
spent on energy efficiency, nearly $1 bil-lion
in California alone, even a very small
portion of those funds going toward wa-ter
sector upgrades would provide sub-stantial
benefit.S
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