Energy Issues in Sustainable Urban Wastewater Management: Use, Demand Reduction and Recovery in the Urban Water Cycle
1
Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture, University of Pavia, 27100 Pavia, Italy
2
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Industrial Electrical Engineering and Automation, Lund University, Box 117, 221 00 Lund, Sweden
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2020, 12(1), 266; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010266
Received: 9 December 2019 / Revised: 24 December 2019 / Accepted: 27 December 2019 / Published: 29 December 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Water-Energy Sustainable Urban Development)
Urban water systems and, in particular, wastewater treatment facilities are among the major energy consumers at municipal level worldwide. Estimates indicate that on average these facilities alone may require about 1% to 3% of the total electric energy output of a country, representing a significant fraction of municipal energy bills. Specific power consumption of state-of-the-art facilities should range between 20 and 45 kWh per population-equivalent served, per year, even though older plants may have even higher demands. This figure does not include wastewater conveyance (pumping) and residues post-processing. On the other hand, wastewater and its byproducts contain energy in different forms: chemical, thermal and potential. Until very recently, the only form of energy recovery from most facilities consisted of anaerobic post-digestion of process residuals (waste sludge), by which chemical energy methane is obtained as biogas, in amounts generally sufficient to cover about half of plant requirements. Implementation of new technologies may allow more efficient strategies of energy savings and recovery from sewage treatment. Besides wastewater valorization by exploitation of its chemical and thermal energy contents, closure of the wastewater cycle by recovery of the energy content of process residuals could allow significant additional energy recovery and increased greenhouse emissions abatement.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
water–energy nexus; urban used water cycle; wastewater treatment plant; waste sludge; energy demand; energy recovery; GHGs reduction
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Capodaglio, A.G.; Olsson, G. Energy Issues in Sustainable Urban Wastewater Management: Use, Demand Reduction and Recovery in the Urban Water Cycle. Sustainability 2020, 12, 266. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010266
AMA Style
Capodaglio AG, Olsson G. Energy Issues in Sustainable Urban Wastewater Management: Use, Demand Reduction and Recovery in the Urban Water Cycle. Sustainability. 2020; 12(1):266. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010266
Chicago/Turabian StyleCapodaglio, Andrea G., and Gustaf Olsson. 2020. "Energy Issues in Sustainable Urban Wastewater Management: Use, Demand Reduction and Recovery in the Urban Water Cycle" Sustainability 12, no. 1: 266. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010266
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
