Engineer Research and Development Center - Environmental Laboratory

Risk and Decision Science Team

West Point WWTF Energy Resilience
Jeffrey Cegan, Matt Joyner, and Luke Hogewood with the West Point Team

DESCRIPTION

Evaluate the resilience of the Target Hill wastewater treatment plant and explore options for maintaining its operation at reduced functionality during electric grid outages. Evaluate the feasibility of anaerobic co-digester to support plant energy resilience.


Problem

Target Hill Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) at West Point. Interested in Renewable energy sources for WWTP resilience, taking biogas from co-digestion and using them for microturbine for electric generation. Which would then be used for Long term solar, microgrids, etc.

Can we offset some of the energy needs of Target Hill?

  • Reduce grid dependence
  • Enable operation during disruption
Map drawing of US Military Academy West Point with Site flagged by a red outline on the west bank of the Hudson River across from Constitution Island.

Bar graph showing Energy (kWh). A dahsed red line for Co-digester Supply runs horizontally just below the first grey line on the graph. A blue bar labeled Normal WWTP Demand rises to just above the 9th line. A green bar labeled Reduced WWTP Demand rises to just above the 2nd line.

Solution

Co-digestion Energy Resilience Tool (CERT):

  • Two components:
    • Co-digester energy production estimator
    • WWTP energy management simulator

Impact

Resilience objective: Reduce extent and/or duration of functionality loss

Potential resilience benefits at Target Hill WWTP:

  • Reduce impact of disruption
  • Maintain partial operation of most critical processes
  • Prevent total loss of WWTP function during a disaster
Upper graphic shows power lines on left, biogas icon on right with green arrows from both converging to the center and pointing to a facility drawing. Beneath this is a line graph with y-axis labeled WWTP Functionality (%) from 0 (origin) to 100 by 25 point increments and x-axis labeled Time. The key shows solid orange line is No Codigester, blue dashed line is with Codigester. The lines start together at 100 then drop suddenly together. the orange line continues to drop to 0, continues at 0 shortly then steadily rises to 100 and across. The blue line drops from 100 to about 40, continues for a time then sloly recovers to 100 and joins the orange line across.