 the impact of environmental considerations on the use of the water, the impact of population growth, some assumptions on climatic conditions. And we have today a panel with very deep expertise from a lot of perspectives on the issue, starting with Kamjar Gavinci, Kamjar's manager of the state integrated water plan for the Department of Water Resources. And then we have Tom Stokely on the other end. Tom is with the California Water Impact Network. He is a water policy manager and also director. But Jude Laspa, Jude's recently retired deputy chief operating officer of Bechtel Group and now serves as a member on the California Institute of Science and Technology. And then Fernando Palluti. And Fernando is in charge of water planning and administration for the West base and water district in Southern California. So with that, I'm Bob Cunningham. These gentlemen are policy people. I'm a nuts and bolts sort of guy. I'm a water chemistry and water treatment consultant. And our firm helps users like yourself solve difficult problems when you're using this water that we all produce and hope we continue to produce. We get involved in things to make your systems run better, to conserve energy, and to preserve your investment in your physical infrastructure. So I'll sit down and I'll introduce Kamjar. Thank you, Bob. And good afternoon, everyone. Again, my name is Kamjar Gavechi with the Department of Water Resources. I've been asked to give you water 101 in five minutes, so I'm going to get right to it. And we can maybe talk more during the Q&A. So California's Mediterranean climate is in large part due to the fact that we get a wide variety of rainfall by as much as 200 inches per year in the Northwest to less than five inches per year in the Southeast. The runoff from that rainfall, which also occurs variably over time, comes into our main river systems, the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River and their tributaries, and that flows out through the San Francisco Bay into the Pacific Ocean. Now, if you draw a transect from Lake Tahoe down to San Francisco, about 80 percent of our runoff occurs north of that transect and 20 percent south. However, the way water is used in California is just inverted. So about one third of our water use occurs north of the transect and the remainder south of the transect. And because of that, over the last 150 years, we've developed a very intricate and elaborate water management system and flood system at the local, state, and federal level. The pie chart, what I'd like to underscore is that about 75 percent of the water supply that goes to meet those uses is managed locally, both in surface water projects and groundwater. Colorado River Water provides about 7 percent and the state and federal water projects only provides about 16 percent of the water supply. However, the water conveyance system is an important part of that state and federal project. Looked at the 10 hydrologic regions of California, which is a very large and diverse state, the white areas are the net exporters of water and the shaded areas are those that import 30 to as much as 60 percent of the water and you'll see the San Francisco Bay region imports more than 60 percent of its water from other regions of the state. Now the delta, as you probably are hearing in the news, is at the hub of our water management system, in part naturally because the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River and their tributaries drain out through the delta into San Francisco Bay, so about three quarters from the Sacramento River and 25 percent from the San Joaquin and the tributaries. Of that water that reaches the delta, about 8 percent gets used there, two-thirds goes out to the Pacific Ocean, again on average, and then about 26 percent gets moved through the state and federal water projects to the Bay Area and Southern California for agricultural and urban uses. This is what we call the butterfly chart in the water plan and I did bring a couple of handouts in the back. These graphics are there for closer inspection. The left wing of the butterfly are all the different uses for 1998 to 2005. The right wing shows the different sources of supply and the right edge of the right wing, the change in surface and groundwater storage, which is an important part of the way we manage water. Now, if you look at the regional level, then you'll really get an appreciation that the mix of uses and the mix of supplies are very different depending on where you are in California, and that's why regional water management is so important here in our state. We've been doing deficit spending with respect to groundwater. This is a groundwater elevation plot for a well in Fresno County from the mid-1940s to the present. During that time, the elevation of the water, the water table dropped 120 feet. That's often called groundwater overdraft. Here's another well in South Yuba County, and for the first part of that same time period until early 1980s, we saw a similar trend. However, then they implemented a conjunctive water management program. That's when they managed their surface water and groundwater together, and they've now recovered the groundwater level to what it was in the mid-1940s. Because this is an energy summit, I thought it's important to emphasize that there is a strong nexus and a growing recognition between energy and water. This is an energy intensity plot for Inland Empire Utility District in Southern California, and it shows for their different sources of supply how much energy they use on kilowatt hours per acre foot, and you'll see it's very diverse. The highest energy uses are for transporting water through the Colorado River Aqueduct and the State Water Project, great distances and over the Tahatchapies, also ocean desal. However, I will note that the Chino desalter, which is brackish groundwater, uses less energy. We also, in the water plan, look at the future, and we've looked at three scenarios, current trends, slow and strategic growth, expansive growth. We looked at population, land use, irrigated agriculture, water for the environment. We also consider climate change. Our snow pack is changing, and the earlier snow melt, the runoff patterns in our rivers are becoming more flashy, and sea level is rising. And all those considerations, we looked at how much water demand might change by 2050, and for those three scenarios, the important point, the solid bar, say we're not destined to ever increasing water demand. How we manage our development, more infill versus sprawl, has a great impact on how much demand we'd have. In fact, the slow and strategic growth scenario showed lower demand than we currently have. However, again, regionally, the way those three scenarios play out are very different depending on what kinds of uses and supplies they have. And you'll see that in the San Francisco Bay, again, for slow and strategic growth, you could have basically the same level of water demand that you have now if development were to occur that way. Moving forward, the water plan update that we're working on now, 2013, is talking about three important themes. One is we have to double down on integrated water management. We have to manage our water along with all the other resources, and we have to break down the silos between the many institutions that have historically governed water. We have to strengthen government alignment of our policies, regulations, and incentive programs, and we have to invest in innovation and infrastructure. This is a very busy slide to note that there's a very robust toolbox of 30 resource management strategies described in the water plan that can be mixed and matched in different parts of the state. And if you're really interested in more information, we have the Water Plan E News comes out every Wednesday, and you can sign up on the Water Plan website. Thank you. Next is Tom Stokely. Hi, I'm Tom Stokely with the California Water Impact Network. We're a non-profit organization that's statewide and we're dedicated to the environmentally sustainable use of water in California. The question is, will the Silicon Valley run out of water? And the answer is that depends on the choices California makes. That busy slide that Camar had, there's a lot of options there. And I'd like to address an element of that crisis, an element that is promoted as a solution, but in reality is an impairment to California's water supply future. It's called the Twin Tunnels, otherwise known as the Peripheral Tunnels. It used to be called the Peripheral Canal. The Twin Tunnels are part of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, an initiative promoted by the Brown administration to allegedly protect and restore the environmental resources of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and to provide water supply reliability from Delta levee failure due to earthquakes and sea level rise. You can see on the map, we've got the blow up there of the two tunnels. Essentially, the idea is to take water upstream of the Delta where it's salty and tunnel it under the Delta to the state pumps at the South Delta. The concept is to spend billions to restore Delta fish and wildlife habitat and build these tunnels. The premise that it's based upon is that the environmental resources of the Delta are failing and also that sea level rise and levee failure from earthquake risk will cause massive failure of these levees that will cause saltwater intrusion and contaminate the pumps. Unfortunately, it does neither. If implemented, this project will actually assure the destruction of California's Delta. There's no information to show that these so-called restoration projects will actually restore the fish and wildlife. What they really need is more fresh water. And it will also saddle California's ratepayers and taxpayers with up to $60 billion in debt and do nothing to enhance the state's water supplies. What it's really all about is getting a 50-year permit under the Endangered Species Act so that they can pump regardless of the impacts on listed species. We do need to actively and aggressively address California's water crisis, but we don't need to destroy the most productive estuary on the West Coast and hawk our children's future to do so. The first problem with the project is simply money. Here's a list of, this is from the BDCP itself. Under current cost estimates, it'll be $60 billion. And that's if there are no cost overruns. These kind of projects regularly go over budget. It's also predicated on bonds being passed by the California voters, two different bonds, and also federal money to the tune of $7.7 billion. Where will this money come from? The BDCP proponents have been vague to the point of coiness. The Twin Tunnels do nothing to alleviate the fact that the California aqueduct serving Southern California urban areas crosses the San Andreas Fault as well as other faults along the way. San Luis Reservoir, the major storage reservoir south of the Delta, the dam sits on an active earthquake fault. And in fact a portion of that dam had failed and there has been no effort to rectify the current situation there. It's also been claimed that this project will not provide any additional water, but it will instead provide water supply reliability. There are other better alternatives to the tunnels. They include reinforcing Delta levees, stormwater capture, recycling and conservation, as well as brackish desalination. They'll create millions of acre feet of new water and create local jobs. Moreover by devoting sufficient flows to the Delta and shoring up existing Delta levees, we can begin the road to the estuary's recovery and providing water supply reliability for our cities. And I'm just going to give you this last slide. This is the kind of technology that is around, it's called plate pile slope stabilization. It's a way to improve Delta levees at a lower cost than current estimates. The Delta Protection Commission estimates that the Delta levees can be reinforced to withstand these risks for two to four billion dollars and yet the state has completely ignored it. The gentleman from Berkeley who developed this plate pile technology approached the Department of Water Resources about it and he was basically rejected off hand. So by investing billions of dollars in these twin tunnels, what we will see is money that goes into outdated technology and not into the new alternative strategies that some of your companies are developing and also it would fund construction projects that would provide local jobs for recycling, conservation, things like that. I look forward to a discussion of these issues. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Good afternoon. I'm Jude Laspa and I'm a member of the California Council on Science and Technology. The council was founded over 20 years ago chartered by the state to provide advice to the executive and legislative branches on science and technology issues. It's made up largely of two-thirds academic, one-third business leaders, heavily focused on the UC system, Stanford, Caltech, and the national labs. They take on a lot of interesting projects that often go against the core in Sacramento because many people up there, first of all, don't understand science and technology. There's so many things that are involved in science and technology that affect decisions and many of the facts when they come out to them run counter to their intuition of what they'd like the facts to say and so it's one of those things where Tom talks about something that's really difficult politically in this state in terms of the twin tunnels but a lot of the stuff we're talking about to them all the time really hits that. Four years ago we did a study of those things that were going to have the biggest impact on California's economic future and one of the two was water and we said we need to find a way to develop a sustainable water future for this state and when we realize how complex that is because what we have to do is recognize that we're entering a period here whether you want to believe in global warming or not where we're going to have longer and deeper climatic cycles of drought and surplus and so what we need is a model that's going to span two or three or four years not just something that can get us through the one off one year time period and so we started this process a year ago through a combination of mechanisms, surveys, focus groups and following the threads of research activities going on today in universities in the national labs and increasingly in the private sector and although we say Silicon Valley is the focus for water issue here actually there's an awful lot of water work done in startup companies in Silicon Valley today and in fact there's an awful lot of work being done in larger companies especially those that are water intensive. What I'd like to conclude with here then we can cover these things in more detail we need to we've come up with about six or seven areas where we're seeing significant opportunities to apply technology either new technology or technology that's under deployed today that can be deployed in a larger sense and let me just highlight two of the ones up here first of all Camar talked about what's underway in terms of aquifer recharge there's a lot of things that can be done in this area ranging from watershed management to active flood management floodplain restoration that can help us get there and we have to just make the policy decisions that are on target to do that. The second area and Fernando is going to talk about reuse in a minute but let me just hit the water treatment area we're finding that there's more and more that's out there and these are at various stages of development some are still concept but more and more of them have moved into pilot plants and pre-commercialization processes where these can significantly help us clean up the water quality issues that we're facing in this state and that will end up helping us a great deal with the resiliency of the system. Fernando? Thank you very much you're marching right along aren't we? We were told we only had three minutes. We have a lady over here with flashcards. All righty thank you I'm Fernando Palludi from West Bay's Immunicable Water District you may ask why where is West Bay's Immunicable Water District and why am I here? Well so West Bay's and is a water district in Southern California I'll get to the map in a minute but I was reading about Santa Clara Valley Water District which is actually your water wholesaler here for the Silicon Valley and I saw striking similarities in both the approach to long-term water reliability the types of water portfolio and management strategies that came are talked about so imagine when I talk about West Bay's and what we're doing think about Santa Clara Valley Water District to help answer the question of will Silicon Valley run out of water? Is it this one? We're off to a bad start here. Is it the one on top? It's the one on the lower right of the computer. I could do it on the computer. I figured I could. All right thank you. I think I've already taken three minutes already. You're fine. So this is the what it's called the Santa Monica Bay in Los Angeles County so we serve we're a wholesale water district that serves 17 cities and unincorporated county areas in South sort of coastal Los Angeles County and you know our mantra to to the question are we get a round of water is is is simply no if you do enough redundant planning and and do the employ the types of management strategies that cameo referred to and so that is the policy of our board of directors and our agency as we move forward this is actually looking forward to 2020 this is what we call our our water supply portfolio sort of like an investment portfolio which you want to diversify mitigate your risk by putting your eggs in several different baskets instead of one that one basket had been the initially ground water in the area but then the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California bringing water down from Northern California as Tom referred to and then also from the Colorado River and so we've taken up a strategy of diversification based on conservation recycled water which we'll get into and reducing that that that wedge of imported water to a more manageable sustainable level and then exploring the possibility of the salinated ocean water we also have a brackish water desalter as well so that's the overview of our water supply and our strategy of diversification so I won't spend a lot of time on on demand management but that's not to imply that it's not important it's actually the foundation of any good water supply portfolio as you start with your water use efficiency and so this just represents a few of the things that that we're doing and now that the sort of the low hanging fruit has been plucked in water conservation we're looking at employing technology getting into new sectors industrial sectors which shown here on top right is a is a smart irrigation controller it's weather based irrigation controller it senses weather conditions and it waters appropriately large scale cooling towers something that Bob's probably familiar with helping those industries cycle their water more often and use less water manufacturing so at the bottom and then a low tech but but huge opportunity in changing the sort of the cultural mindset of Southern Californians about what outdoor landscaping choices that they that they make kind of going getting away from the old turf model into more climate appropriate and that's sort of a long-term change that will yield huge benefits though since you can imagine about 60 to 70 percent of all residential water use particularly in Southern California is outdoor so that that's a huge sector to tap into but then getting into the more we call high tech new water sources this is a picture of our Edward C little water recycling facility in the city of El Segundo that and what you see here in the foreground are solar panels that produced about 10 percent of the peak power plant but and I'll get into this in a minute what we're world renowned for at West Basin is producing five different qualities of recycled water in one at one plant and those designer waters as we call them because they're customized to and tailored to the specific use that the treatment process and the cost is tailored to the specific end end user and fortunately in Southern California in our area we have very large refinery oil refinery customers which is really the backbone of our system so so starting at number one tertiary water the lowest quality of this is by the way recycled wastewater so this is LA city's wastewater that we divert keep it from going into Santa Monica Bay about 10 to 15 percent of it bring it to our plant and produce products if you will that replace precious drinking water for for non potable purposes number one is tertiary water it's irrigation water it's actually regulated by the health department safe to drink but it's not you're not allowed to drink it so we use it for irrigation and light industrial purposes nitrified water is the tertiary water with the ammonia removed that's good for cooling towers and then the three on the right are all more high-tech based their micro filtration and reverse osmosis which is sort of the standard now in in water treatment and the three different ones are what's called barrier water it's really groundwater replenishment so this is indirect potable use of treated wastewater it's going into the ground and then eventually pumped out and consumed so indirect potable reuse and we'll get we'll get back to that in a minute it's the most complex process micro filtration reverse osmosis ultraviolet radiation and then advanced oxidation through ultraviolet radiation so this is very very high-tech in order to make sure that the water is safe to put back in the ground and ultimately consumed and then we have the two on the bottom which are industrial applications also micro filtration and reverse osmosis single pass is for low pressure boiler applications at refineries for example we have Chevron refinery right across the street from our treatment plant and we also serve BP and an Exxon mobile all use this type of water for their low pressure boilers it's all de mineralization to the point where they can use it for boiler applications and then double pass reverse osmosis producing near distilled quality water for high pressure boilers again the refineries I think only Chevron actually uses that quality of water so you can see that that we tailor the product to the customer and then just to show you how things have evolved in in this secondary effluent really means wastewater coming into our plant up until the 1990s there was several steps used prior to reverse osmosis to help clean the water prior to that step that's been replaced since the early 1990s by micro filtration and then the health department required us to put UV or ultraviolet radiation after reverse osmosis beginning in 2000 when we started to increase the amount of recycled water we were putting into the ground and then now in our most recent expansion we know we're looking at using ozone prior to micro filtration in order to break down organics and keep our reverse osmosis membranes from being fouled and then eventually that water goes into an environmental buffer which is really the ground water aquifer so this is the model for for indirect potable reuse of recycled water today and this is just to do a little bit on on micro filtration and reverse osmosis so micro filtration really is it's a membrane process you see on the bottom right it's actually about 2000 of these tiny plastic straws bundled together into a cartridge and you can see on the bottom right that's what one single strand looks like that plastic straw has tiny holes one three hundred to size of human hair on the surface of it and so and that surface is represented by that cartoon where water is put under pressure it's about 20 psi forced through the tiny pores in the surface of the straw and the cleaner water the permeate goes out the end of the straw and then it goes to reverse osmosis again a membrane process this is more like you can imagine a jelly roll or a or your kitchen paper towels are there wrapped around a center that is there's a plastic perforated tube in the middle with a plastic sheet of fuel a membrane a permeable membrane wrapped around it water is is forced under pressure through spiraling through the membrane and then the clean water goes out the end of the end of the pipe those micro those reverse osmosis membranes are housed within the white ceramic tubes those are bundled into arrays and water is then sent through that that process represented by the cartoon again your feed flow coming from microfiltration water getting forced through the the membrane this captures now the the smaller organics salts and minerals so that your your permeate is a very very pure water pure than most than most tap water not to dwell on on ocean water desalination but it's the same process the only difference is that the source water you're using is seawater much much more highly saline than wastewater so it requires more pressure to force it through the membrane that more pressure requires more energy and more cost which is the the most common criticism of of ocean desalination so we're looking in that this is our our pilot facility in the city of redondo beach producing about 20,000 gallons a day for demonstration purposes it also allows us to test intake and discharge technologies because the other challenge with ocean desalination is being protective of marine life so we are looking at that and just to show you an example these are the four ease that we concentrate on the most passionate one that we feel about is environment and so we're testing a intake technology that features a screen that reduces velocities for the intake so that sea life doesn't get impinged on to the screen or is or entrained and put into the pumps this helps then to reduce mortality of sea life dramatically and so we're testing that as well so I wanted to conclude with looking forward to the future this is the cycle of treatment that I talked about for indirect potable reuse this is what we do today at our at our treatment plant wastewater treatment gets put through advanced water treatment which is reverse osmosis plus ultraviolet radiation but then it goes to a natural barrier system this is the the ground water aquifer it gets further treatment in the soil matrix for about 20 years before it's pumped out sometimes sent to another water treatment plant on top of that and then back to to the urban water use again completing the cycle what something called direct potable reuse proposes to do in the future is really to eliminate the steps of the natural treatment system and further water treatment so then now you're looking at sort of short circuiting that and going back into into the distribution system so really the challenge here is to produce a engineered buffer that replaces the natural buffer and to increase public confidence in this process so I think a lot of research is still to be done but and I was just talking to to Bob about this there's a very concerted effort underway to raise money for research to identify what are the remaining research areas in the social sciences and technology operations that need to be addressed so that someday this becomes a reality and part of the process is to obviously have this the regulations in place by the Department of Health Services to allow this to happen that doesn't exist today but through legislation they have established a deadline for convening expert panels to identify the research needs and actually write those regulations in the next few years so that and I'm not predicting when 10 20 years down the line I think we may be able to see you know this type of of sustainable use of our completing this you know the wastewater treatment cycle and and having this be a huge potential water source in the future just keep in mind that along the California coast there's three billion gallons a day of wastewater effluent to the ocean we only recycle about 650,000 acre feet today in California I think coming to check my numbers and we have a goal of I think over a million acre feet and I'm not sure sure when that that goal is for the state of California we're never going to get there by doing what we're doing at West Basin for example which is treating water sedentary finaries through purple pipe they're just not enough and it's cost prohibited to do that on a large scale but to imagine this where we can take that huge potential of wastewater effluent going to the ocean reuse that you know then we're going to see we're going to make those goals and then some in California so that's an exciting opportunity the obligatory quote this one by the British poet Auden and thank you very much Fernando thank you I have a quick question for Fernando where does the water come from for the astronauts it comes through the process similar to so the process is there the research work needed is just further development so that we can magnify the scale of that and produce great volumes of water rather than small volumes of water right and have the public confidence in it yes yeah that's the big issue that's going to get nowhere and we've been set back several times because of the toilet-to-tap mentality so the water factory 21 in Orange County that's essentially taking wastewater cleaning it up injecting it in barrier wells right behind the barrier wells drinking water wells so they've been drinking that water filtered through the sand for approximately 26 years 27 years so all we're talking about doing is replacing the filtration element rather than the sand and soil it's going to be some sort of an artificial media that's correct questions from the audience better than I did Jim are there really any barriers other than dollar barriers to that direct potable water we use you go to Singapore and almost every drop of that water is cleaned up it goes either dumped into the reservoirs so it gets some flavor or goes to industrial use or they sell it under the name of new water and I got a few bottles at home I can tell you it's not very it's not great to drink because they take everything out of it it's so tasteless that you got to put some junk back in it to make it worth drinking but is there is it is the only barrier here simply cost or is there really something that is either sociological or technological that stops us doing what Singapore does I think the short answer to that and I'll defer to the panelists is sociological I don't believe it is a cost issue well from the state's perspective it's there's also a public health concern so department of public health as Fernando mentioned is coming up with new guidelines for indirect potable reuse for putting recycled water in the ground but also into surface reservoirs I know San Diego and others are very interested in taking treated wastewater and putting it into a surface reservoir that would allow for that natural barrier before it was used department of public health was also directed under the same legislation to begin looking at the issues that would need to be dealt with for direct potable reuse and right now in particular there's a lot of concern about emerging contaminants endocrine disruptors hormones and other things that get into our human water wastewater and so that part of that building that public confidence will be to have reassurance from a scientific point of view that there wouldn't be a public health concern if after the reverse osmosis the water was put directly back into the water distribution system economically that makes a lot of sense because right now to use the waste water excuse me the recycle water directly it has to go into purple pipe system and that's adds a lot of cost to buildings and and that additional infrastructure yes sir our microphone is where there we are yes sir you have the mic yeah I've got the mic hi I'm Don Wood Draper Fisher Jervitsen we're venture investors I've got a question about water conservation what are the incentives of the water municipal water districts to to conserve water since your revenue comes from selling water and we've had you know 50 years of electric utilities acting like they care about conservation but not really doing much about it so how is it different with water and and then also as a side question how important is residential water consumption in the big picture well that's a that's a very good point and that's something that we grapple with and for it and frankly don't do a very good job of explaining to the public you know why their water rates continue to go up when when they are conserving water and that's simply because we we work in a very capital intensive business huge fixed costs and and when you sell less water you make less revenue but you still have those huge fixed costs which are tied up in your infrastructure so so we need to do a better job of explaining that to people what is our motivation well we simply can't do without it I mean we could never justify the advancements that we're making in in in recycle water and ocean desalination without first doing everything that we can within reason I mean you can always throw more money at it but but what are you sufficiency really is the backbone of you know of what we do so it's it is the right thing to do and so there really is that there's really no way around it I mean that that's something that we we must do but then we need to make sure we look at the pieces about where the efficiency is because ag agriculture in California consumes a tremendous amount of water and the the person who's paying for it there is the is the grower and the grower has a lot of levers that they can pull between optimizing the amount of water it takes per unit of out of product that they have to the selection of the products they that they have because there are many things that are grown which are high value crops in California which are much lower water intensity than than others there's some that still require flood irrigation and you could still argue that rice is is a good crop in California because of the environmental and the wetlands restoration issues so it's a very complex then but you have to sort of get it back to where the consumer is on this and and have them be part of that process as opposed to trying to drive it through some kind of regulatory regime that really will fly in the face of what market forces can be incented to do part of it depends on where you live in the big picture statewide if we have about 80 million acre feet on average of water use about 10 of that nine and a half to 10 is for what we call it urban water use which is the residential institutional and industrial of the residential water use as Fernando mentioned as much as 60 to 70 percent even higher in the desert southeast of the residential water use is outdoor water use so in California we have been very successful in reducing our indoor water use over the last 10 15 years the next big opportunity is the landscape water use yeah actually maybe about seven and a half to eight is residential so industrial and institutional is not a big part of that I wanted to point out one thing about the Twin Tunnels project in that it would be tens of billions of dollars that will be billed to these urban water agencies with no additional water so you're going to basically have bills go up without more water to sell as Fernando pointed out that's already an issue for the districts and that's one of our big arguments against it is why would Southern California or the Silicon Valley spend billions of dollars not to get any more water when in fact they could spend billions of dollars to recycle that waste stream that's going out into the ocean the just one other point as I you know as part of the California water plan I get an opportunity to talk with folks throughout California and one thing that is reinforced everywhere we go is conservation is one of the most cost-effective strategies available to water agencies throughout California so while on the one hand you're right by reducing the water delivery it is affecting their revenue stream and there are work that's being done now to come up with more innovative rate structures that can provide the funds for the fixed cost of the delivering the water and still provide a variable rate that can incent conservation but it makes good business sense for agencies to invest in conservation because the next strategy available to them would be more costly I think the provision of water is one of the largest energy users in the state what is the industry or the different districts doing to support the use of renewables and other alternative sources of energy to support that yeah well that that's one thing on the screen we have we're employing solar panels but you're right I and I the figures vary I've heard the the 15 20 percent of all energy use in California is is related to the procurement the distribution of water so so it is it is a huge it is a huge issue I don't have didn't have enough time to talk about it but this whole water energy nexus is a very interesting and promising opportunity but and the gentleman you sort of insinuated about the the power companies you know getting the energy sector to buy into the fact that there's this concept of embedded energy in in water delivery particularly in Southern California when you have to pump water over the Hatchby Mountains into Southern California it's a it's a huge but I think it's the single greatest use of energy in the state and getting them to understand and agree to what the what is the investment they can make in water conservation so that by saving you know a gallon of water you save a certain amount of energy and vice versa and that that nexus is be is becoming more and more evident and hopefully we'll you know we'll continue to drive investments across those two industries I'm not sure if that answered your question Adrian can we have the mic down here this gentleman's been very patient the one thing I'll add on to that is a big part of the opportunity for energy saving is in user appliances so a lot of the energy that's dissipated is because of water that's not used efficiently at the tap or we heat water and then we use it and it goes you know the energy to heat it as well as the water energy used to get the water there goes goes out the drain I wonder if one of you could talk a little bit about how water prices are set compared to how electricity prices are set I'm familiar with the the arduous regulatory process that the PUC uses to allow energy electricity prices to go up not at all understanding how the city of Mountain View where I live decides how to how to set water prices they both have a three-tier ascending block kind of pricing structure where on the margin a homeowner who uses a lot of water pays four times as much per gallon as someone who's a frugal user in an apartment seems to me that there might be more transparency about this or maybe I'm just unaware of the opportunities people have to have input to the process well that's a very good question the very complicated answer particularly when you consider that their race setting is a highly political process our rate setting at West Basin is fairly simple we're a wholesaler we have retail customers when it comes to the sale of potable water we don't have an inclining block structure we have to have a declining block structure for recycled water because we want to encourage its use but at my understanding at the retail level there are as a way to help conserve we're seeing greater and greater adoption of these inclining block structures they can create inequities and then I just wanted to again reinforce the fact that and this is something that we deal with all the time rate setting at the local level at the municipal level is a highly political process and and so you see these periods where where rates are not raised to keep up with investments in infrastructure replacement of infrastructure which is becoming a very very large issue and then you have private water companies that serve about one out of every five Californians and that is the PUC process on the water side that's is regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission and they actually get a greater return when they do invest in infrastructure and so they have a they have a very different rate setting structure so what I guess what I'm pointing to is that that there really is no consistency and that in itself causes a great amount of frustration amongst water users all around the state what I could add to that is the California Urban Water Conservation Council just this last week held two workshops one in Sacramento one in Southern Cal on water rate structures because it is recognized as being a big deal and I think the the goal is to have consistency of approach and principles but recognize that each agency water agency depending on where they are and what their water supply mix is has to approach rates setting differently so you can't have a cookie cutter approach because their infrastructure is different their fixed rate proportion is different and I totally agree with you that a lot of the frustration on the customers is the lack of the understanding and transparency so it's it's almost been kind of a counter incentive in that people have been conserving they're using less water and yet they see their water rates go up and it's because it hasn't been clearly described that the rate increases because of the deferred aging infrastructure the fixed rate cost but to the average homeowner that they don't understand that so water agencies are going to have to do a better job at having continual communication with their customers on what part of their water bill is for the fixed cost the delivery of the water there and what is for the actual water use the variable water use month to month I believe this lady from post graduate school here has had her hand up for a long time. I'm Mitzi Worthheim with I'd actually like to look at you I'm Mitzi Worthheim with an able post graduate school I've been dealing with energy since 04 it is an unbelievably complex topic and it doesn't matter which one which door you used to get into this space actually like it because it's complex but part of the challenge is exactly what you've been talking about which is communication so I deal with all my friends who are in academia dealing with lower kids and they say if you don't write your story in a way that an 11 year old can understand it you've lost your audience because you want the general community to get it that's really hard cartoonists tend to be very good at doing that but journalists who have to write short pieces I mean I'm dealing with these kinds of folks in Washington as we try to figure out how to educate people we don't do it in the schools I mean and I keep thinking about what these be great problems I mean when I went to school the math problems where you had trains coming from different directions at what point were they going to crash I think these are much more interesting problems to have kids working at and you know kind of what happened with we wanted to change attitudes about smoking we taught it in the schools and they went home and how did their parents and I think maybe what you want to do is involve journalists students art students and and make it sort of a crowd searching or a crowd collection activity where they all take part of the ownership of telling the story so the people you're trying to reach can actually get it I totally agree well I can only speak for myself and Department of Water resources you remember that busy slide I put up with the 30 resource management strategies one of the newest strategies we're just adding is outreach and education so it's now been recognized as a very important part of doing water management and I I think you know the water education foundation in California I think has done a admirable job of putting out pretty non-bias water information but I think it's up to every you know in California we have a lot of fiefdoms in water people we have 58 counties several hundred cities over 2300 special districts that are responsible for managing some aspect of water and historically they haven't communicated well and that's why the state is working with locals to create more regional collaboratives and now we've got 48 regional water management groups who came together because the state put water grant program and said called it integrated regional water management and so in the Bay Area you have a regional water managed two or three regional water management groups that can help there the other thing is they did a survey just recently and asked people where does your water come from and only 10% of the public knew I mean they it comes from the tap right so we have time I believe for one more question and then they've asked me to be the policeman the folks with the higher pay grade than mine because they say you have other interesting topics to get to this and only five minutes to get there so let's try one more question wonderful to take the Silicon Valley part of the session title seriously for a minute what what kind of what would you say would be priorities for city governments and industry actors in Silicon Valley I mean you've talked about a lot of different pieces but where would where would your priorities be well I would say find your regional water man the closest regional water management group to you and get involved and that's where the state is really putting its marbles to try to advance these collaborative regional water management groups and that's where the state is putting its funding to try to partner with locals I see here in Silicon Valley some of your local municipal water companies are taking a very proactive approach with reclaimed water some of the others maybe not so much of a proactive reproach approach yet anything you can do to encourage local water officials to take a hard look at research at recycle water I think would be very helpful all of these facilities we see around us here have cooling systems all those cooling systems could be operated on recycled water rather than potable water but I think just like every other part of the state it's not going to be one size fits all type of thing and you need to be pulling on five or ten levers at the same time because these these efficiency improvements can have a huge impact in terms of the demand so there's it's just some parts of the state are more important we don't have the industry here in terms of those high loads and agriculture here so it has to be focused on the commercial and the in the residential and I also think that bond acts state water bond acts we've had many of those over the years there's one scheduled for what is it next year in November 2014 November of 2014 right now it has I'm not sure the exact numbers but I think it actually has more money in there for restoration of the Delta than it does for for recycling conservation those kinds of things I would like to see more what more money for local solutions rather than these large projects that shipwater hundreds of miles what the really the future of California and the Silicon Valley is regional self-sufficiency of water not bringing it hundreds of miles and we have a heartbreak for another commercial sponsor right here your next session thank you very much and I believe most of our panel members will be here for the afternoon