The water bill fell by $740,000. Everything downstream fell by four times as much.
A published example, not a Valutus engagement. We cite it because the figures are unusually clear: the savings outside the water bill came to four times the savings on it.
When you start to think like we think, you don’t see water in the pipes. You see dollar signs.
Eric Berliner, water and environmental manager at IBM Burlington
Compared with other manufacturing inputs, raw water is cheap. Under a cent a gallon for commercial use. Its operational value is nothing like its price.
Semiconductor production needs ultra-pure water to wash contaminants off the wafer, since anything left behind becomes a defect. The Burlington plant produced nine custom varieties of water, each costing four, five, or even ten times more to make than the raw water going in.
So when post-production water was simply discharged, what left the building was not cheap water. It was everything that had been spent turning cheap water into the nine kinds the plant actually needed.
Custom varieties of water produced on site, each far more expensive than the raw intake.
Fishman 2011
The raw water came from Lake Champlain and arrived very cold. Cold enough that the plant spent real energy warming it before it could be processed.
At the same time, to keep the manufacturing equipment from overheating, the plant ran thirteen two-story chillers around the clock, making cold water.
The plant was paying to warm water at one end and paying to make cold water at the other. Each process was sensibly run. Neither knew about the other.
In hindsight the answer is obvious. Route the freezing intake water through the cooling system first, so it absorbs heat from the machinery.
One heat exchange does both jobs. It cools the equipment, and it pre-warms the intake water on its way to the utility plant. The cost of warming falls, the cost of cooling falls, and less raw water is drawn in the first place.
This is what makes the example worth citing. The water saving is the part that shows up on an invoice. The energy saving is a consequence of the same change, and it is much larger, but nothing in the accounts connects the two.
Nobody was hiding it. There was simply no line on any report where a water decision and an electricity bill met.
The visible result was a 29% reduction in water use, worth $740,000 a year on the basic water bill. That is the number the project would have been judged on.
Two more followed from the same change. Treating 29% less water cut chemical and filtration costs by $600,000 a year. Using the intake water for cooling, and the recovered heat for warming, cut electricity and energy costs by $2.3 million a year.
For every dollar cut from the water bill, about four more were cut elsewhere.
$740K water · $600K chemicals · $2.3M energy
The water saving was real and it was the smallest of the three. An organization that measured only the water bill would have booked a $740,000 win and never seen the $2.9 million standing behind it.
Charles Fishman, The Big Thirst (2011), and Fast Company, April 2011. Figures as reported there. The plant’s semiconductor operations were sold to GlobalFoundries in 2015, so this is a historical account. Valutus was not involved in this work and cites it as published reporting.
The smallest number was the only one being counted.