 I am with the Hawaii State Energy Office and my honorable guest today is a long time friend, Lauren Roth Venue, and I might call her Ms. Water or Ms. Water Conservation for all of Hawaii. She's been in the water business for a long, long time and actually makes a good living at it. I'm delighted to report. Just to put two hats on her today, CEO of 3R Water, which we will be discussing, and then also CEO of Roth Environmental Ecological Design, which she's had forever. And we know that climate change is coming and maybe something that she hasn't considered is that one of her many programs encourages the landscaping such that the water seeps into the ground instead of running off and going down the storm drain. I am a perfect example myself. I live in Upper Manoa, very, very wet, and after a heavy rain, my driveway comes just a teeny little trickle of water, whereas my neighbor, we have side-by-side driveways. He has paved over a heck of a lot of his property, and there is just a waterfall gushing down his driveway and into the storm drain. Question, what if he absorbed as much water as my property does and multiply that by 10,000? Wouldn't you have even greener, even lusher away on our hands, and we'd have a nice full water table? Right now, we're all lush and green. I was just out on the Waianae Coast. All that area is lush and green right now. That ain't going to happen forever. We will have a drought. We are going to have other emergencies. Here to semi-rescue us at least from a water standpoint is Lauren Roth-Venue. Lauren, why don't you start? She's doing all these great things. Why don't you start by telling us the program that you're working in concert with the city about? Sure. Thank you so much, Howard, for having me on. Again, it's always good to see you and happy to share with you some of the updates on some of the work we've been working on. I don't know if it makes sense now to go through some of the slides. I think it'll give a good basis for what we're doing now with RER Water and with the city and county of Honolulu. But as you mentioned, stormwater runoff is a huge deal. Not just here in Hawaii, but this is really becoming a global issue in many cities as these cities prepare for the effects of climate change. And stormwater does, we can talk a little bit about that, but as people might be aware and how you just mentioned, essentially when you can't get water back into the ground, that can impact future supply. And so the more urbanization we have, the likelihood of water when it rains getting back into the ground gets diminished. So green infrastructure is a method that the city and county of Honolulu recognizes for sustainable water management as well as many cities across the U.S. But essentially what it does is it peels back some of that urban hardscape and you begin to implement things like rain gardens and by retention or even parking lots that have permeable pavement or rainwater harvesting systems. And what that does is it captures that stormwater, retains it, infiltrates it or if you have a sister and you can then of course reuse that water. And so new developments or redevelopments across the city when they're greater than one acre have to implement green infrastructure. That already exists in the rules. But then the question becomes now we have so much existing development that really has the biggest impact. So we can talk a little bit about it and you kind of brought it up, but the city has been working on the potential and feasibility of implementing what's called a stormwater utility. And so these stormwater utilities in essence impose fees on all properties based on the amount of impervious area you have. So that means the more hardscape like roofs and parking lots and so forth the more you pay. And then with that you can be incentivized to reduce that hardscape by implementing these green infrastructure practices and then get a reduction potentially in your bills. So these stormwater utilities are in like 2000 plus locations across the United States and continuing to grow also in nine countries. And really this is a response to the fact that most cities drainage networks were just not designed for this many people and this intense frequent of storms. And so this is a way to get a dedicated fund essentially to update the drainage infrastructure and get more green infrastructure projects out in the community to really be a top-down and bottom-up solution to address the needs especially with climate change. And can you Lauren can you define hardscape and previous? Yes absolutely. So when I say hardscape I would say things like things like with concrete surfaces where essentially when it does rain the water cannot get through that material. So that would be things like when it you know when the rain hits a roof for example it's it's it's not going to penetrate into the ground at that building footprint. Or if you have a parking lot with asphalt a typical asphalt or typical concrete when the rain hits that surface it's not going to be able to penetrate down through that material. So those that's considered impervious meaning like you it's not a permeable you cannot get water through that material. And then on the opposite side when we say we want permeable or pervious surfaces that means then we want that rainwater is then able to infiltrate through that material and get into the ground. And again that's like acting like a sweet we think of the the ground as acting like a sponge so when it rains that rainwater can fill up fill in that sponge and then that slowly percolates and you know builds up our underlying aquifers and ground water but when it hits hard surface it doesn't have the ability to do that and it goes directly into our city drainage networks and then directly then into streams and oceans and in some sense it's you know lost water every time it rains. And we don't want to have lost water by by any means. Yeah and and I mean then going back to that drainage infrastructure it's not designed for you know large volumes going in and that's where we could get ourselves into trouble with more hard surfaces and more intense frequent storms those two combinations could be really really hard on for us in our city we are one of the cities that are vulnerable to these impacts with more urbanization climate change with more heavy storms and this is this is not unique to Hawaii this is this is happening in a lot of locations across the globe. Yeah some somehow the geographic locations of Houston and Louisiana come to mind immediately. Absolutely and I actually just through their office of climate change and resiliency they they are able now to they're going to be creating incentive programs in place like Houston where properties can basically apply for grants and get and get these get typical community projects they can put out millions of dollars to basically get it back out into both for residential and commercial properties and priority areas to hopefully build back that sponge especially as you can imagine these areas are very susceptible to storms. Very susceptible yeah and then come to think of it also what comes to mind is rivers when rivers you put all the storm water into rivers then the rivers overflow and destroy property and so forth so forth. Exactly yeah so then that's and that's typically what as people aren't aware you know they're you know you basically when you have a city drainage network which which we the water goes into the storm sewer now in in Hawaii we have separate wastewater sewers that's different versus our storm water sewers which but when that when that does rain the water flows off that driveway or flows off the road and it goes into you know an area where it collects and into the pipes and you know those those systems a city is required you know maintain and try to keep that water clean but the more we have of the storm water going in the harder it is to do that but the point is is there's a water quality issue that happens too when it goes directly then into that pipe system and then into our our streams here in Hawaii which then will cause the streams to fill up and potentially overflow but then also we have you know manage the pollution issues as well. Yep all of that speaking of which how does this all tie into the fact that we have at last a new plumbing code? Yeah so right that's a great question Howard so I was thrilled to hear that we as the city and county of Honolulu and is adopted the UPC 2012 which includes oh sorry the the uniform plumbing code and so with that and I believe it's chapter 16 it has provisions for the reuse of non-potable water back inside buildings for non-potable end uses so when we talk about potable versus non-potable potable water is that the highest quality drinking water that you would you basically are ingesting non-potable is things like you know would not be used for drinking water but is still perfectly good water for things like flushing toilets for irrigation you know potentially for makeup water for cooling towers fire suppression water features and so we commonly actually do that in Hawaii not necessarily in the building but we have like a recycled water program here you see purple pipes that's that's considered non-potable water and it's being used for non-potable end uses now most commonly we see that at golf courses for example today what what this plumbing code does is it allows now us or now as developers to basically capture water on property that could be something like rainwater harvested from the building roof so that's a stormwater piece and or things like treated gray water and black water to create R1 water that could be basically reused back inside the buildings for things like again toilet flushing cooling tower makeup water because in the urban spaces there's not really much irrigation to be had because as we were talking about we have all this this hardscape for a lot of its you know you know highly urbanized so the real way we can maximize the reuse of water capture and use of water and minimize that you know bigger water footprint is actually to use it within the structures themselves so the plumbing code is definitely a key component for that and and then the stormwater piece is important because you know if we can capture that rainwater off of the building building roofs you know store it and then you know that helps prevent the flooding use potential flooding localized flooding issues it also provides a water conservation measure so there's a lot of positivity for doing that and now being able to use that water in a in a more beneficial way back inside buildings is really I think going to be a great driver for how we think about how we design our urban core. Am I mistaken or did Punahoe school in its rebuilding implement measures like that? They did I don't believe that they did the dual plumbing because at the time I believe that the the plumbing code only got passed in August I believe of this year so so if there was prior installations of rainwater harvesting I think they used that to support their a water feature as well as irrigation but yeah it's great to see that schools are doing that especially I think it's so important for the kids to learn about these practices and and not to do real but when we've been talking about the the mobile application 3R water developed it was called follow the drop and it's still called follow the drop we we received funding from the state of Hawaii water water security advisory group which was managed by DLNR as well as the Hawaii Community Foundation to really develop the first working prototype of the app and we partnered with KUPU and we actually ran it in schools to start because we thought you know we want to create this a mobile app and an education effort that you know boys kids can get involved in and begin to really understand like what are the challenges we're having in our water resources here locally what's the challenges we have an infrastructure and then importantly give them solutions like green infrastructure like rain gardens and catchment tanks and so forth that they can then go around and and essentially using the mobile app can identify opportunities of where and how much storm water is being generated opportunities to implement these green infrastructure projects and then essentially through that initial grant we actually were able to get a few of those schools on some projects or get their rain gardens actually installed for them as part of their their overall class effort so I'm always I love it when you know we can really get the kids involved I think it's it's super important because this is really their future that we're talking about infrastructure takes a long time to get get right and get set it's probably constantly evolving but certainly when we kind of set up what the future of water management is going to look like it's certainly it'll be our kids today that are going to be inheriting inheriting what we're putting in now yeah and lord knows they've they've got to do a better job just in general than we're doing yeah and just getting them to think about these issues at a young age you know and so this was like a design thinking curriculum kind of got developed around this program to really have them critically think about these issues and importantly give them some solutions but I think it's important to begin the conversation early I mean this was this was a you know group of fifth graders you know so and they they can continue to have that knowledge and work on solutions in all types of ways to build more resilient communities as they you know go through school so and and this is hands-on this is outdoors hands-on real stuff and that's the way that we human beings learned for millennia from the beginning of our species it's only in the last couple hundreds that we were sitting around reading books and scratching on pieces of paper now typing on computers absolutely yeah no absolutely i think it was and showing them what's going on here absolutely and of course and and kids learn differently some kids learn by doing with their hands and some kids are more cerebral but so given the opportunity to do both and and kind of maximize the way that they can learn important issues like like climate change and building resilient communities I think is is great so yeah that was a really great program we finished that up in 2019 and then what happened was we once we had that you know we were working with the city and county of Honolulu they were interested on some of the education pieces too but then basically as they were starting to develop their stormwater utility I think it occurred to both of us that I mean we are in and the city that how it could be used to support their community engagement piece as well as potentially being the method of which you know different property owners could submit projects for fee credits or rebates once the stormwater utility would go out so that's kind of where we are right now and so what it what it means is essentially the app can help when we license the software to the city they can distribute it for free for every you know person on the walkway to use and what we'll do is if you however were one of the users you would be prompted to take a photo of some kind of drainage device let's say on your property like a downspout and when you take that photo it'll bring you into your location through the through the software just like the drop pin does in maps and then it'll prompt you to select an image of what you're looking at so it'll have a little icon of a downspout that if you don't know what what it is you're looking at exactly it'll show you the different things to try to identify so you can select in this case the downspout it will then prompt you to then draw with your finger the area of the roof that you think you're capturing from that downspout and then we pull in all the rain gauge network across the city and because of your geolocation we can tell you okay your that your annual rainfall is 40 inches a year or what have you so with that information of the drainage area and the rainfall we now produce a bar graph that this downspout is outputting you know 50,000 gallons of rainwater annually and then it then provides you different options of solutions so you can select you know a rain garden or rainwater catchment we're going to be adding in permeable pavement and it'll provide you optimum sizing for each one of those solutions and then with this with the city we're doing a pilot you know where we would be linking in seeing how we could link in to the customer billing database and what we'll do is be able to say by you putting in whatever size and type system that you're putting into the app it'll show you your potential monthly or annual fee credit or discount you would get and so then through the app you would submit the project and so when you submit the project the city then receives it on the back end they could see all the users that are submitting projects and then the city's then able to review these projects and then you know get you'll be able from there be able to to qualify them for a potential fee credit or rebate or even grant if it ends up becoming the case and then also on the back end they can track you know locations and status of these projects like you know what timestamp when they were installed are they being maintained that kind of a thing which is really critical as well as providing metrics that they can use hopefully we support for compliance purposes that they have to meet with for state and that federal compliance for having an MS4 program or NPDES but then also what's important is those metrics could be used for our resiliency measurements so we can see how much stormwater we are collectively as a community capturing and infiltrating um and insert and these and these around the island so so there's all different kinds of ways the data can be used but that's essentially um how the product works you're going to fall and I believe maybe you have some uh slides to back all this stuff yeah sure um well I've introduced 3R water but yeah in a sense you know our our goal and mission is really just to build water security and resiliency through technology so um you know don't want to get too much background but but you know as Howard had mentioned you know you know I've been in the water sector now close to 20 years with my own design firm for 16 years and this really came out of an effort I'm not sure if folks know too much about the Hawaii fresh water initiative um but essentially the Hawaii fresh water initiative um was an effort to basically meet state water security goals um by the year 2030 by implementing practices like capturing stormwater and so through my design efforts we've I've been involved in integrated water resource planning and green infrastructure design and this really came out of an effort to say like we wanted to go out to our commercial clients and say like here how can we quickly find opportunities for you to implement practices that would that would meet the goals of the fresh water initiative and then specifically this ended up focusing on on stormwater so anyway you can go back to the slide I just want to give a little premise of how it came to be so we we talked about this briefly but I mean the issue really that we're seeing with stormwater the problems that we're really addressing is that with more urbanization and more frequent intense storms the likelihood of flooding increases and also the likelihood of more pollution or waterways also increases then then on the flip side of that it you know when we have more hard surfaces you can't get that water back on the ground so now stormwater runoff when we get it going into pipes can also mean impacting future supplies so you can go next slide and then of course we talked about the climate change so basically this has been now the real driver um you can go ahead next slide Haley and so here again is really what these cities are trying to promote they're trying to promote green infrastructure as a solution to address that flooding pollution and future water supplies so these green infrastructure practices um that we you know permeable pavement uh rain gardens especially the green green side of things also have all these positive things like reducing heat island effects for example you know the more green space you put back in there's a cooling factor absorbing co2 um you know helping restore the natural hydrology building biodiversity so there's a whole host of other things that are positive with green infrastructure beyond just stormwater okay and can you explain those those photos look slightly different one from another can you explain that a little bit yeah no absolutely so yeah the top one is a is a is a cistern system so it's capturing that rain water from a building roof and putting it into a tank um and then of course with that with that water you could um use it uh at another time the bottom one is uh would be a uh what's called a rain garden or bioretention and it's taking the storm water here from a walkway or this could be from a street it could also be from the downspout of a building and putting it into this engineered um you know rain garden that basically then captures that storm water stores it filters it and then infiltrates it back into the ground so that's just a couple examples of a few two different green infrastructure practices um so so basically like I mentioned you know follow the drop was really developed to be a bottom up and top down solution to get more green infrastructure up out into urban spaces but we found that there's just not the first one on the one side there you know getting the community involved is is highly important for us to really feel resilient so you can't just rely on the city to try to upgrade our drainage network for the hundred-year storm it just would be cost prohibitive so we need to start you know creating more sponges in the city and this is a mechanism we can motivate people to do so especially with storm water utilities where they exist you can go next slide and so this is just a little um diagram showing some of the interfaces and some of the things that it supports so um as you can see in that little rain cloud that represents a sensor essentially that we bring in the rain existing rain gauge network of um of gauges that are out there we bring it into the app um through that photo in this example that downspout we are then able to calculate um we'll be able to know the annual rainfall that that second image on the uh moving from the left um is is a the where you can draw with your finger the drainage area of that roof going to that downspout um so using that those two information we're able to get bar graphs as I mentioned of storm water runoff you can implement the projects um it also supports you know the city and a whole host of other things so on the right hand side you're seeing the administrator viewpoint where it shows the maps of where these projects are located tracking the volumes um and how much storm water is being captured through these green infrastructure projects um and so then again it provides that data metrics a little bit of asset management but importantly really getting that community engagement so again using the app you can then install or you could you could submit your projects for a potential fee creditor rebate with these municipalities um you can jump through this this was the pilot that we did these are just all the partners um when we first made the app a bunch of great community community partners you can go next slide um and then just just a little bit of a diagram again how it works um you know we we basically provide a license to the city storm water agencies the property owners then can submit projects through the app and then essentially the storm water utilities can can review these projects for fee credits rebates and give that back to the property owner quickly the next slide I'll just um do real quick so basically we're doing a pilot right now at the city in County Ponalulu we're doing a one water approach including the board of water supply in this discussion we're going to update the the existing mobile app to match the city incentive program and um and then importantly we're running this with Malama, Manalua, the test region will be Aina-Haena and so again depending on how COVID's really going to go forward we'll be by appointment or um or forward door to door again next summer essentially to get folks involved um using the app and getting surveys and feedback on what what what it would take or what additional incentives they might need to actually install these projects so wow yeah really impressive yeah thanks it's it's we're excited we're really excited to um have the opportunity to work with the city on this and um we're hoping for good things to come out of it and in the 30 seconds we have left what if people want some follow-up information on this? Sure I mean if they can go to 3R water website which is www.3rdashwater.com and hopefully we'll have some updates there they can also go to the city's stormwater utility website which is I believe stormwaterutilityawahu.org um I might have that wrong but they're close close enough um and they'll they can learn more about what the city has been preparing and they've been how they've been going on the approved boards all the presentations are there a bunch of information about um uh that program is on their website. It sounds like Konolulu is one of the leading cities in the entire nation in in this initiative yeah no it's another handful of cities we're partnering with there um we are starting to work and talk with some other cities um to match a pilot doing some more pilots in the US um certainly Konolulu is doing a lot of things right and so one of you know really I think we are pushing the envelope on how we bring come bring people together as a community across our agencies to really move forward in a collective way which is I think the only way forward if we're gonna you know really build resiliency anywhere so I think we do an excellent job doing that okay and on that very cheery note we must uh bid fond de due Lauren Roth Benu thank you so much great seeing you again and you were doing great things before you're doing bigger and better things now so thank you very much signing off for Think Tech Hawaii Cold Green see you next time