“Essential infrastructure that everybody needs and nobody thinks about.”
That’s how Sunnyvale Environmental Services director Ramana Chinnakotla described the city’s new $102 million wastewater headworks and primary treatment facility at June’s ribbon-cutting. The event honored the small army of city employees and past and present city council members whose dedicated leadership and focus “made this project possible,” said Chinnakotla.
The new primary treatment plant is one of the largest projects in Sunnyvale’s Cleanwater Program, a $1.3 billion multi-year effort to rebuild the city’s 70-year-old sewage treatment system. The new plant is the first step in cleaning wastewater so it’s clean enough to safely discharge into San Francisco Bay or recycle for non-potable uses — about 300 million gallons a year.
“We kicked off a master plan to renovate the plant over 20 years,” said Sunnyvale Mayor Larry Klein. “We’re finishing phase one now. Ultimately, we still have three projects that are still in the works and 20 [infrastructure] projects planned over the next 15 years.”
The plant, which has operated continuously since its construction in 1956, is one of the oldest treatment plants on the West Coast and needs regular repair or replacement due to wear or to meet new safety and technology standards.
On typical days, the plant handles 13 million gallons of wastewater every day, according to plant manager Rohan Vikramanayake. During storms, that volume can grow to 40 million gallons.
The new plant is also part of Sunnyvale’s sustainability plan. Combined with food scraps from the recycling plant down the road, the solid waste that’s filtered out of the sewage generates biogas, which, in turn, generates electricity.
“We’re now utilizing food waste from our SMaRT [recycling] Station to power the planet, as opposed to sending food scraps to the East Bay,” said Klein. “We process it here on plant and convert it into energy.”
The modernization will also reduce Sunnyvale’s carbon footprint by more than 4,000 tons.
Condition assessments completed in 2009 identified the replacement needs, and Sunnyvale developed the master plan for the new plant in 2016.
The city benefitted from more than $600 million in federal and state loans and funding for the multi-project Sunnyvale Cleanwater program.
“We were able to get very low interest infrastructure loans for this project,” said Klein. “So, we pay that off over a very long period of time. During COVID, a lot more of that infrastructure funding was made available during that time.”
One of the biggest challenges in rebuilding a sewage treatment plant is continuing to operate while work is underway, said Klein.
“It’s a jigsaw puzzle of moving things around,” he said. “It’s like keeping the plane flying while you’re renovating the plane, and it’s not that easy to do with a 70-year-old plane.”
The bottom line is that the city is planning for the future, according to Klein.
“The Cleanwater Program is a significant investment in our aging infrastructure that will ensure we’re able to provide essential wastewater treatment services well into the future as Sunnyvale continues to grow,” said Klein.
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View Comments (2)
I thought food waste in Sunnyvale was supposed to be going to slop pigs…
According to this article the city's sewage water treatment plant uses the food recycle materials to make fuel. I would like to know if this is happen now and how that is possible or is this a future plan. The majority of us citizens do not like the way the food scrap program was set up with the split lid garbage cans with the food part being so large.