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TURNING TRASH INTO ENERGY
Providing high-quality city services to residents and businesses in Placer Valley goes beyond electricity . Roseville is also focused on environmental stewardship and is working to simplify recycling and conserve water , and it has plans to turn trash into energy to fuel the city ’ s power plant and garbage trucks .
Placer County ’ s One Big Bin program allows customers to toss all their waste into one can and it is sorted for recycling at the Western Placer Materials Recovery Facility , which is jointly owned by Lincoln , Rocklin and Roseville . In Rocklin , residential and commercial garbage pickup is done by a private contractor , Recology , which turned 1.6 billion pounds of organic material region-wide into compost , according to its 2018 sustainability report .
“ We collect 100,000 tons of garbage a year ,” says Maurice Chaney , spokesman for Roseville ’ s Environmental Utilities department . The trash and 39 tons of commercial food waste collected weekly is turned into compost , which residents may purchase for use in their gardens .
Roseville is expected to expand its wastewater treatment plant from 9.5 million gallons a day to 12 million gallons . The project , estimated to cost $ 78 million , will also include an anaerobic digester that will turn sludge into methane gas and electrical power . “ One of the largest costs of treating wastewater is electricity , and this project will help lower those costs ,” Chaney says . “ The compressed natural gas will be used to power our garbage trucks .”
The city helps residents and businesses conserve water use and cut down on their bills with audits that find ways to reduce water usage . To buttress the city against future droughts and to accommodate a growing population , Roseville has been replenishing underground reservoirs for a decade . In the spring of 2019 , Roseville transferred 952 acre feet of water to a reservoir under the city , according to Roseville Today .
Water for Rocklin and Lincoln is supplied by the Placer County Water Agency , but Lincoln supplements that with four city-owned deep wells . • in the top 10-15 percent nationwide for reliability , saying its customers experience an outage about once every eight years , a benefit of having 85 percent of its distribution lines underground . As the city added 100,000 residents over the last 30 years , electrical lines and other infrastructure were placed in the earth for new developments and paid for by development fees .
Another benefit of a city-owned utility is it can pay for projects like the Roseville Utility Exploration Center . About 40,000 people yearly visit the 3,000-square-foot-plus education center , which hosts interactive workshops on environmental and recycling topics for all ages . “ There was a conscious effort by the utilities to start this education early , because these lessons are good for the community ,” says Rachel Tooker , Roseville Utility Exploration Center ’ s supervisor .
With Pioneer Community Energy , a community choice aggregation , a board of elected officials procures lower and stable prices for customers in Auburn , Colfax , Lincoln , Loomis and Rocklin . CCAs like Pioneer were created in the aftermath of California ’ s deregulation of investor-owned utilities in the early 2000s , intended to enable local control of prices for power and advance the use of renewable fuels .
Pioneer is part of a larger cooperative that includes the Bay Area Rapid Transit and several cities in Northern California to boost its buying power . The power it purchases is distributed to customers by PG & E , which also is responsible for billing customers . Although Pioneer ’ s customers lose power in a fire safety shut-off , they benefit from the savings created by Pioneer ’ s electricity purchases , which currently make up about one-third of its electrical power , according to Jenine Windeshausen , Pioneer ’ s executive director . “ We posted our most recent rates in November ( 2019 ), and they are about 11 percent lower than PG & E ’ s ,” she says .
Windeshausen says Pioneer is also working with PG & E to improve electrical distribution and reduce disruptions from shut-offs . “ We are working with PG & E to identify circuits that are vulnerable to power outages and encouraging them to beef those up ,” she says . Longer term , Pioneer is also studying how to create microgrids in areas near hospitals and other vital services to improve electric reliability .
Although the CCA can buy power from many sources , Windeshausen says Pioneer ’ s priority is to buy as much as possible locally , including from a biosolids facility near Rocklin , the Western Placer Waste Management Authority and local commercial-sized solar farms . “ We very much like local control in buying power that also has economic benefits for the area and supports local jobs ,” she says .
Bill Sessa is a Sacramento-based freelance writer .
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