Despite the nice spate of rain we’ve had recently, Austin remains in Stage 2 of its drought contingency plan, which it’s been in since August of last year.
The demands on our region’s water will only continue to grow as our population increases, which is why in 2018 Austin Water created its first-ever 100-year integrated water resource plan, Water Forward. This year sees the completion of the first update to that plan (updates will continue every five years), and recently Austin Water held an open house outlining everything the plan includes.
“We’re planning for 100 years, and over that period of time, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what could possibly happen,” explained AW’s Marisa Flores Gonzalez. Rather than selecting one likely future, they’re gaming out several possibilities, including worse droughts than the historical droughts Central Texas has experienced.
To update Water Forward, Austin Water evaluated six of these different scenarios, taking into account economic costs and equity, as well as how the strategies would affect the environment. The focus “is on being able to stretch our current Colorado River and Highland Lakes supplies as much as we can,” said Flores Gonzalez. Austin Water settled on a portfolio that includes not only water loss control and use management but also new supply strategies.
One of the main supply-side strategies, Aquifer Storage and Recovery, was first pitched by Austin Water in 2021. That project, described by Austin Water as a “water savings account,” would store water in a nearby aquifer during rainy seasons to pull out for use during drought. Austin Water will settle on the best aquifer for it by the end of this year – so far the Carrizo-Wilcox and Trinity aquifers in Travis, Bastrop, and Lee counties are most promising. They expect to have that savings aquifer operational in 2040, with the design phase to begin in 2028.
Other supply strategies include reusing treated wastewater, and using Decker Lake as a new reservoir and treating its water to pull into the Austin Water distribution system. Yet another strategy – the newest – is to desalinate brackish groundwater from the Colorado River for non-potable uses. By 2080, all those strategies combined would add an extra 125,200 acre-feet of water to the system (for reference, the combined storage of the Highland Lakes in July of this year was 1,106,412 acre-feet).
That means all those new supply strategies would only boost our already half-full lake supply by about 11%, which is why reducing demand is an equally, if not more, important part of the reliability puzzle.
The most important strategy Austin Water has to control water loss is to encourage the average consumer to save more water. Luckily, a new tool will help Austin Water do that soon. MyATXWater, a citywide smart water meter program, will replace 250,000 analog meters with wireless-connected digital ones by the end of this year. The new meters offer each Austin Water customer a portal that shows you your real-time water usage data (you can sign up to see that using your Austin Water account number and check the map for details on where installations are occurring). This data will help Austin Water analyze where water is being lost the most in the city, so they can do targeted outreach and even offer incentives to those customers for conservation. They also plan to expand leak-detection programs, provide incentives for each new build in the city to include native and water-efficient landscapes, and expand Austin’s purple pipe system, which uses treated wastewater for non-potable uses like irrigation or toilet flushing.
The purple pipe system was approved by City Council in March of this year and includes installing on-site water reuse systems in new builds, as well as providing incentives for current commercial properties to switch to that system. It’s funded by a new charge that increases the average residential customer’s bill by $1.47 per month. That’s expected to generate about $10 million yearly (that charge is not applied to those in the Customer Assistance Program and certain affordable housing projects).
One of the best ways to conserve water is to get rid of your lawn and plant a native landscape instead – Austin Water estimates that outdoor irrigation makes up 20% of total water demand in Austin. Austin Water offers rebates and incentives for doing things like adding compost or mulch to keep soil moist, changing irrigation heads to drip or low-flow nozzles, and planting native plants like Texas sage, lantana, salvia, mountain laurel, and agave. If you do this and send photos to AW, you could be reimbursed $1 per square foot up to $3,000. It also could save money on your water bill – Austin Water notes on its website that “typically, turf grass needs 1 inch of water weekly in summer, while mature native beds may require only ½ to ¾ inch every other week.”
All in all, these strategies will be presented to the Water Forward Task Force this month, which will recommend the plan to Council for approval in November.
This article appears in September 13 • 2024.