Can Las Vegas Become A Mecca For Water Tech?

Imagine one of many fist sized hydrophones hidden in a sandy patch of shrub, continuously listening for the tiniest of leaks along a miles long pipeline that transports 7.5 million gallons of water each day to hotels and casinos along the Las Vegas strip.

These hydrophones are pieces of sophisticated water technology. And it’s not random chance that the first public utility in the country to deploy this technology is in Las Vegas.

If the Las Vegas Strip is perhaps the gaudiest place on earth, Las Vegas is also possibly the most frugal and forward looking American city in one respect: water. And now it’s working to leverage that reputation by turning itself into a hub for new and innovative water technology.

In the thirstiest city in the nation’s driest state (Las Vegas gets just 4 inches of rain a year), water is the last thing the city wants to gamble on. After 16 years of drought, water levels in nearby Lake Mead, the city’s primary water source, have dropped so dramatically that white rings have formed on its banks.

Las Vegas has responded with a slew of water conservation measures. New front lawns have been banned for years, and for those lawns grandfathered in, the city actually pays residents to pull up their turf, and convert to desert landscaping. Golf courses receive attention getting fines for exceeding their rationed allotments.

And even as the city has grown by fifty percent people since 2000, thanks to a robust recycling program that treats and returns to Lake Mead most of the city’s indoor water, it has managed to slash its aggregate water use by a third. But that’s merely the most visible and easily measured success.

With increasing pressure on water supplies around the United States and the world, innovation is becoming critically vital.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority has become a nationally recognized leader in water quality treatment. This utility boasts a state of the art laboratory that produces ground breaking research and a group of scientists who routinely publish in major academic journals.

Driven in part by Nevada’s near collapse during the Great Recession, the state, the city of Las Vegas, the University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute, the regional water authority, and private industry teamed up in 2014 to turn that reputation for water innovation into a catalyst for innovation and job creation.

This coalition created WaterStart, a small incubator that finds and tests promising water technologies and helps them move quickly to market. Examples include:

• Technology to remove nitrates from well water.
• Devices that use drones to measure plant stress from the air to improve irrigation precision.
• And as described above - nondescript listening devices stashed along the Strip to detect leaks before they can cause millions of dollars in lost water and lost tourism revenue.

If a test by Las Vegas’ regional water utility is successful, this can have a huge marketing impact for the company that devised the technology. Already, WaterStart has received dozens of inquiries from other cities about the hydrophones.

 One example is Intelligent Modeling Ltd., a company that maps rain induced flood patterns and is doing a test run with the Southern Nevada Water Authority. They see this test as a springboard that could open up the North American market for this British company.

Companies helped by WaterStart pledge to set up shop in Las Vegas or elsewhere in Nevada when they become commercially viable. Over time, as the world’s interest in water technology grows, this could bring a different set of jobs to an economy overly dependent on tourism and gambling.

Nevada cut a deal in 1922 with six other southwestern states that gave the state an annual allotment from the Colorado River. The 94-year old Colorado River Compact still governs the city’s water use. Almost a century ago, that allotment of 300,000 acre-feet (one acre-foot is the amount of water covering one acre of land one-foot deep, about 325,000 gallons) was more than sufficient to satisfy a state with fewer than 100,000 people, and a population of fewer than 5,000 in the Las Vegas valley.

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Amazingly, Las Vegas still has enough, with water to spare. Rigorous conservation efforts don’t just outlaw front lawns, but also dictate when residents can water their flowers and wash their cars.

And here’s a crucial water management tool: for every gallon returned to nearby Lake Mead 15 miles away, Las Vegas gets credit and can take another gallon out, and it’s not counted against its water allotment.

As a result, virtually every drop of water used indoors, which accounts for 40 percent of total water consumption, is treated, recycled and returned in near drinkable quality to its source in Lake Mead. That’s a highly unusual feat for a water agency.

To a large degree, this is the legacy of one person. By 1989, Patricia Mulroy was running the Las Vegas Valley Water District.

Patricia Mulroy became a celebrity, and was known both as the city’s Water Czar and its Water Witch. Under her direction, a brazen move was made to buy up unclaimed groundwater in eastern Nevada and bring it to Las Vegas on a still unbuilt 300-mile underground pipeline. This was an emergency reserve if Lake Mead continues its decline.

 Patricia Mulroy, now 63, retired in 2014 and is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Mountain West campus at UNLV.

In 1992, Mulroy helped push through a new umbrella agency, the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA). Mulroy ran this new central authority ran for 23 years, which included the seven local, often competing agencies in the Las Vegas valley. This umbrella agency made it much easier to craft water resource strategies for the entire valley region.

From the start, Mulroy recognized that if a water agency was to prosper in the middle of a desert, innovation had to be an integral part of that agency. New potential contaminants are always being discovered, and new regulations are put in place to control them.

Here in Las Vegas, especially in a tourist dependent economy with 40 million plus annual tourists, our local economy is highly dependent on maintaining a sufficient water supply as both tourism and our local population continue to grow.  Twitter