[Federal Register Volume 84, Number 184 (Monday, September 23, 2019)]
[Notices]
[Pages 49719-49721]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2019-20541]


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DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY


Notice of Request for Information (RFI) on Water Security Grand 
Challenge Resource Recovery Prize

AGENCY: Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Department of 
Energy (DOE).

ACTION: Request for information (RFI).

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SUMMARY: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) invites public comment 
providing information and feedback on the design of a potential prize 
competition with a goal of increasing resource recovery from municipal 
wastewater treatment plants across the United States, and in so doing, 
lower the ultimate cost of treatment by extracting additional value 
from the wastewater (i.e., improve energy efficiency). Through this 
potential prize, DOE would seek novel, systems-based solutions from 
multidisciplinary teams to implement resource recovery at small-to-
medium-sized wastewater treatment plants. Specifically, the intent is 
to encourage teams of wastewater treatment plants, engineering and 
design firms, technology developers, resource customers (e.g., farmers, 
electric and gas utilities), and others to develop holistic community 
and/or watershed-based resource recovery plans for their respective 
wastewater treatment systems. Input from this RFI may be used to 
further develop the competition objectives, rules, metrics, and 
incentives.

DATES: Responses to the RFI must be received by October 23, 2019, no 
later than 5:00 p.m. (ET).

ADDRESSES: Interested parties are to submit comments electronically to 
[email protected]. Include Water Security Grand 
Challenge Resource Recovery Prize in the subject of the title. The 
complete RFI document is located at https://eere-exchange.energy.gov/.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Question may be addressed to John 
Smegal, U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and 
Renewable Energy, 1000 Independence Avenue SW, Washington, DC 20585-
0121. Telephone: 202-586-2222. Email: 
[email protected]. Further instruction can be found 
in the RFI document posted on EERE Exchange.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:

Background

    The DOE-led Water Security Grand Challenge (``the Challenge'') aims 
to advance transformational technology and innovation to meet the 
global need for safe, secure, and affordable water using a coordinated 
suite of prizes, competitions, early-stage research and development, 
and other programs.\1\ The Challenge consists of five goals; this RFI 
focuses on the goal of doubling resource recovery from municipal 
wastewater treatment plants by 2030.
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    \1\ https://www.energy.gov/eere/water-security-grand-challenge.
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    Wastewater treatment plants purchase about $2 billion of 
electricity each year and face more than $200 billion in future capital 
investment needs to meet water quality objectives.\2\ These expenses 
can stress municipal budgets. For example, energy consumption at 
wastewater treatment plants can account for a third or more of 
municipal energy bills.\3\ Energy costs are expected to increase over 
time \4\ and affect affordability of water for businesses and 
consumers.\5\ Disposal of residual biosolids from water treatment is 
another significant cost for municipalities. Wastewater treatment 
plants can address these challenges by recovering resources and turning 
them into marketable products. This can create new revenue streams for 
upgrading water treatment infrastructure, particularly in rural 
communities, reduce nutrient pollution, and provide new sources of 
alternative water supplies. Recoverable resources include energy that 
can be used on-site or sold; nutrients such as phosphorous and nitrogen 
that can be used as fertilizer; and clean water that can be reused for 
agricultural, industrial, and potable purposes. When the value of the 
recovered resources more than offsets the cost of recovery, the overall 
cost of wastewater treatment is reduced. In addition, resource recovery 
contributes to system-level energy efficiency because recovering energy 
from wastewater reduces the amount of grid electricity required to 
operate the wastewater treatment plant. Moreover, recovered water 
(treated wastewater) can offer a substitute for water sources with a 
higher level of embedded energy (including desalinated water and water 
that is conveyed over a long distance) for industrial, agricultural, 
and municipal use. Recovered nutrients (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorus) can 
be a less energy-intensive substitute for fertilizer on agricultural 
land.
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    \2\ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Clean Watersheds 
Needs Survey 2012, Report to Congress. January 2016. https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-12/documents/cwns_2012_report_to_congress-508-opt.pdf. Electricity dollar value 
derived from electricity consumption estimates contained in 
Arzbaecher, C., K. Parmenter, R. Ehrhard, and J. Murphy. 2013. 
Electricity Use and Management in the Municipal Water Supply and 
Wastewater Industries. Palo Alto, CA: Electric Power Research 
Institute and Water Research Foundation. http://www.waterrf.org/PublicReportLibrary/4454.pdf.
    \3\ EPA, Water and Energy Efficiency at Utilities and in the 
Home, https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-water-infrastructure/water-and-energy-efficiency-utilities-and-home.
    \4\ Arzbaecher, et al.
    \5\ DOE. Water and Wastewater Annual Price Escalation Rates for 
Selected Cities across the United States. September 2017. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/10/f38/water_wastewater_escalation_rate_study.pdf.
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    To make progress on the goal of doubling resource recovery from 
municipal wastewater facilities, DOE is considering a potential prize 
competition that seeks to increase resource recovery from municipal 
wastewater treatment plants across the United States. This prize is 
intended to target small-to-medium-sized wastewater treatment plants 
(e.g., facilities with flows on the order of up to 50 million gallons 
per day), as larger facilities are more likely to be already engaged in 
or developing resource recovery strategies. The envisioned outcome of 
this prize competition is the development of novel, system-wide 
solutions that leverage existing resource recovery technologies to 
improve resource recovery in these small-to-medium-sized facilities and 
also contribute to energy efficiency at the facility and/or system 
level.
    Competition participants are expected to be multi-disciplinary 
teams of stakeholders that will develop holistic, community- or 
watershed-based resource recovery plans. Teams are likely to be 
comprised of wastewater treatment plants, engineering and design firms, 
technology developers, resource customers (such as farmers, electric 
and gas utilities), and others.
    As currently envisioned, the prize would consist of two phases. In 
the first phase, teams would submit a high-level facility schematic and 
business plan that demonstrates the cost-effectiveness and viability of 
their resource recovery plan.\6\ Successful plans would demonstrate how 
the approach reaches threshold levels on certain resource recovery 
metrics, while contributing to energy efficiency at the facility and/or

[[Page 49720]]

system level as discussed further below. Plans meeting this threshold 
would then be judged on their innovation and replicability. At the end 
of phase one, DOE anticipates selecting multiple teams for relatively 
small awards (e.g., 10 selections receiving $50,000 each). DOE may also 
publish selected teams' plans on a DOE website. DOE expects to provide 
teams about six months from prize announcement until phase one 
applications are due.
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    \6\ Provisions for safe guarding sensitive or proprietary 
information submitted in response to the prize competition will be 
detailed within the rules and procedures for the prize to be 
published subsequent to this RFI.
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    Teams selected at the end of phase one would have the opportunity 
to progress into the second phase of the competition. Phase two of the 
competition would require the submission of detailed and technically 
rigorous plans that demonstrate how teams would finance and construct 
their resource recovery solutions, with such plans supported by 
quantitative analysis and/or modelling. In phase two, successful plans 
would be judged by modeled achievement of resource recovery metrics as 
well as by contributions to energy efficiency, financial viability, 
technical and engineering rigor, and the broad replicability of the 
plan. At the end of phase two, a smaller number of teams would be 
selected for higher-dollar prizes (e.g., two selections receiving 
$250,000 each). DOE expects to provide teams about a year from phase 
one selection to submit final phase two materials.
    As part of the financial viability aspect of phase two, DOE 
anticipates aligning phase two submission requirements with the 
application requirements of public financing programs (e.g., from the 
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Water Infrastructure Finance and 
Innovation Act (WIFIA) program and Clean Water State Revolving Fund, 
among others), enabling participants to be well-positioned for applying 
for these funding sources.
    Quantitative metrics would play a critical role in the judging 
process of both phases of the competition. DOE envisions applicants 
will need to meet a minimum threshold of resource recovery for one or 
more resources (i.e., energy, clean water, and/or nutrients). This 
threshold could be expressed as a recovery rate (i.e., the percent of 
resource recovered relative to the total amount of that resource 
present in influent) or as an improvement rate (i.e., an increase in 
recovery rate over some baseline). Additional metrics or guidance would 
be developed to assess submissions on other criteria beyond these 
thresholds, including energy efficiency, innovation, replicability, and 
technical and engineering rigor. In phase two, financial metrics will 
also be used for judging, which may include levelized cost of avoided 
disposal, net present value of recovery streams, lifecycle costs of 
recovery, or others. To ensure diverse solutions applicable across a 
range of facility types, DOE may also introduce other factors to 
judging, such as geographic diversity of applicants, facility size, 
category of resources recovered, and treatment technologies used.

Request for Information Categories and Questions

Category 1: Overall Prize Concept and Objectives

    1. Can a prize-based approach contribute to achieving the goal of 
increasing resource recovery across small-to-medium-sized wastewater 
treatment plants? If so, what aspects of a prize in particular can help 
achieve this goal? If not, what other approaches could be considered? 
Are there other complementary activities that can be pursued to 
increase the impact of the prize?
    2. Are there other, similar initiatives that could help inform this 
prize?
    3. One of DOE's primary objectives with a prize is to stimulate the 
development of multi-stakeholder, systems-based solutions. Please share 
any examples of these types of solutions you have observed as well as 
what you believe advanced these solutions. Conversely, what barriers 
exist to the development and execution of these types of collaborative 
integrative solutions?
    4. What resource recovery technologies do you believe are most 
promising in the context of this prize, and what challenges exist in 
integrating these technologies into wastewater treatment plants? Are 
there promising systems configurations that incorporate multiple 
technologies?
    5. What state and local policies are effective at enabling the 
acceleration of resource recovery at wastewater facilities? Conversely, 
what regulatory and policy barriers prevent acceleration of resource 
recovery?
    6. What barriers prevent potential resource customers from 
purchasing and using resources from local wastewater treatment plants?
    7. What stakeholders are important to engage as partners or 
competitors?

Category 2: Prize Design

    1. Is the proposed two-phase prize concept the most effective way 
of ensuring actionable ideas emerge from broad stakeholder teams? Is 
the proposed timeline (i.e., about six months for phase one and a year 
for phase two) sufficient to ensure DOE receives thoughtful, well-
crafted application materials?
    2. Does the lack of a demonstration phase in the current proposed 
prize design limit the effectiveness of the approach? How could the 
design of the prize competition be enhanced so that participants are 
best-positioned to implement their proposed solutions after the 
competition is over?
    3. Are the proposed incentive levels (i.e., $50,000 for teams 
selected in phase one; $250,000 for teams selected in phase two) 
sufficient to incent participation?
    4. Is 50 million gallons/day an appropriate cutoff for competitor 
facility size?
    5. How can the prize competition be structured such that the 
lessons learned from the projects that are selected through the 
competition are generalizable and useful to other wastewater treatment 
plants and communities? How can the prize be designed to generate 
replicable outcomes?
    6. A key objective of the prize is to position participants to 
successfully apply for financing from other public agencies. Does 
aligning phase two application requirements with the common application 
requirements from such programs help to achieve this goal? Are there 
other ways of achieving this? What financing programs are important to 
consider?
    7. Please share any other perspectives on details of the prize 
design.

Category 3: Criteria and Metrics

    1. As currently envisioned, the prize targets the recovery of 
energy, clean water, and nutrients. Are there other resources that are 
being recovered or could be recovered from municipal wastewater that 
should be included in this prize?
    2. Within the categories of recoverable resources proposed for 
inclusion in the prize, are there industry-standard quantitative 
metrics that measure the level of resource recovery?
    3. As discussed above, DOE may require applicants to demonstrate 
how the proposed plan reaches threshold levels on resource recovery 
metrics. For these ``threshold levels,'' is a fixed recovery rate or 
improvement rate more appropriate as a threshold to measure resource 
recovery for small-to-medium-sized wastewater treatment plants?
    4. What are ambitious but achievable targets for the metrics 
identified in questions two and three in this section at an individual 
plant level, i.e., what are the ``threshold levels'' that

[[Page 49721]]

applicants should need to achieve at a minimum to be considered for 
selection?
    5. What are ambitious but achievable targets for plant-level and/or 
system-level energy efficiency improvements for recovery of clean 
water, nutrients and other resources?
    6. What metrics are appropriate to assess the financial viability 
of a submission as part of phase two judging?
    7. How should DOE assess the innovativeness of prize applications?

Request for Information Response Guidelines

    Responses to this RFI must be submitted electronically to 
[email protected] no later than 5:00 p.m. (ET) on 
October 23, 2019. Responses must be provided as attachments to an 
email. It is recommended that attachments with file sizes exceeding 
25MB be compressed (i.e., zipped) to ensure message delivery. Responses 
must be provided as a Microsoft Word (.docx) attachment to the email, 
and no more than 20 pages in length, 12 point font, 1 inch margins. 
Only electronic responses will be accepted.
    Please identify your answers by responding to a specific question 
or topic if applicable. Respondents may answer as many or as few 
questions as they wish.
    EERE will not respond to individual submissions or publish publicly 
a compendium of responses. A response to this RFI will not be viewed as 
a binding commitment to develop or pursue the project or ideas 
discussed. This is solely a request for information and not an 
announcement for a prize competition. EERE is not accepting 
applications or submissions for a potential prize competition. If EERE 
pursues the potential prize competition, it would be announced through 
a separate solicitation.
    Respondents are requested to provide the following information at 
the start of their response to this RFI:
     Company/institution name;
     Company/institution contact;
     Contact's address, phone number, and email address.

Confidential Business Information

    Pursuant to 10 CFR 1004.11, any person submitting information that 
he or she believes to be confidential and exempt by law from public 
disclosure should submit via email two well marked copies: One copy of 
the document marked ``confidential'' including all the information 
believed to be confidential, and one copy of the document marked ``non-
confidential'' with the information believed to be confidential 
deleted. DOE will make its own determination about the confidential 
status of the information and treat it according to its determination.
    Factors of interest to DOE when evaluating requests to treat 
submitted information as confidential include: (1) A description of the 
items; (2) whether and why such items are customarily treated as 
confidential within the industry; (3) whether the information is 
generally known by or available from other sources; (4) whether the 
information has previously been made available to others without 
obligation concerning its confidentiality; (5) an explanation of the 
competitive injury to the submitting person that would result from 
public disclosure; (6) when such information might lose its 
confidential character due to the passage of time; and (7) why 
disclosure of the information would be contrary to the public interest.

    Signed in Washington, DC, on August 30, 2019.
Valri Lightner,
Deputy Director, Advanced Manufacturing Office.
[FR Doc. 2019-20541 Filed 9-20-19; 8:45 am]
 BILLING CODE 6450-01-P