by Shane Henson — September 6, 2013—As drought conditions rage across many areas of the country, telecommunications giant AT&T and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) unveiled this week a suite of tools that U.S. commercial buildings can use to collectively save up to 28 billion gallons of water annually, equivalent to the amount of water that more than 765,000 Americans use at home in a given year. Buildings with cooling towers typically use 28 percent of their daily water use for cooling, according to figures from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s WaterSense program, and they have the opportunity to reduce that water demand by 14 to 40 percent with this toolkit, say AT&T and EDF.
The Building Water Efficiency toolkit is the result of data and lessons from pilot projects that ran across the United States during the summer and fall of 2012, say AT&T and EDF. It gives organizations simple, cost-effective resources to build their own water efficiency programs and includes both technical and management tools to design, implement and document water savings. The combination of tools can be used to create the business case for investments in efficient water management.
For its own operations, AT&T says it identified water savings opportunities of 14 to 40 percent per pilot facility and did so in a way that also made business sense. One cooling tower filtration system upgrade costs less than $100,000 to install but promises more than $60,000 in annual water and sewer savings—paying for itself in less than two years—and a minor $4,000 equipment upgrade to expand free air cooling promises nearly $40,000 in annual savings. These savings—deployed company-wide—add up, notes the company. Through free air cooling and optimized cooling towers, AT&T aims to reduce its approximately 1 billion gallon annual cooling tower water use by 150 million gallons per year by 2015. Cooling tower water use accounts for approximately 30 percent of AT&T’s 3.3 billion gallons of annual water use.
“Thirty-one of our top water-consuming facilities are in water-stressed regions,” explained John Schinter, AT&T executive director of energy. “We couldn’t wait until a drought put a strain on our operations; we needed to manage risk from water scarcity and increasing water costs today. EDF helped us find ways to do so that were good for the communities where we operate and that were financially sound.”
To further its water efforts and collaboration with EDF, AT&T is hosting EDF Climate Corps fellows for the fourth summer in a row. One fellow is focused exclusively on continuing to realize water and energy savings from free air cooling, while another fellow is helping with a regional outreach program to share the tools and findings with organizations in water-stressed areas.
