Building a 100% Renewable Water Utility from Scratch: Insights from ENOWA's Gavin van Tonder

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate and inform the water sector, from across the globe. My name is Piers Clark and today my guest is Gavin van Tonder from NEOM or ENOWA. I think we're going to hear about the differences between NEOM and ENOWA and we're going to be talking about how you prepare a water utility for 100 percent renewable energy.

Gavin, thank you for joining us today.

[00:00:29] Gavin van Tonder: Thank you very much, Piers. Thank you for having me today.

[00:00:32] Piers Clark: So, um, we'd like to start with learning a little bit about your background. Now, your background's really interesting because you're not from the water utility side, you're from the water sector, but you came from the supply side, from Itron, is that right?

[00:00:47] Gavin van Tonder: Yes, indeed. In fact, in order to start up the the strategy around NEOM, they didn't want, let's say, a water utility or somebody that had been in the water utility background. They wanted someone more from a technology perspective because we were building something completely from scratch. So I was the president of Itron water based in the U. S. In Austin. we, uh, we did, we sold mainly in the beginning, uh, water meters, water sensors, heat meters, and, uh, and, and leak sensors and technology around measurements. Uh, and, uh, then we started to transfer that company into a services company. And we did, uh, hundreds of utilities where we actually did a lot of non revenue water services from beginning to end.

So

[00:01:33] Piers Clark: when was it that they approached you and said, uh, come and play over here?

[00:01:38] Gavin van Tonder: Uh, let's say in April 2018, I was approached by the then, uh, CEO of NEOM, which was the ex CEO Siemens at the time, and we had had a partnership with Siemens. So he knew of me and he approached me to come and do this. And as you can imagine, at that time, NEOM was really just a dream.

[00:02:00] Piers Clark: Yeah, yeah. Well, and so now let's come to talking about what the dream of NEOM was, and, uh, and let's assume that there are some people listening to this who haven't heard about the NEOM project. So can you outline what the NEOM project is, and also the relationship between ENOWA and NEOM?

[00:02:19] Gavin van Tonder: Yes, so Neom is a very large area the size of Belgium that is being developed in the northeast on the border of Jordan, northeast part of Saudi Arabia.

Uh, and it's this new facility, new, let's say, region that's, which has a bunch of different developments, one of them being the line. Many people would have heard of this big line.

[00:02:38] Piers Clark: Yeah, it's got a lot of the press attention, hasn't it, the line?

[00:02:42] Gavin van Tonder: But it's not only the line is, a mountain resort called Regina.

There's a developing along the coast of Aqaba called Magna. There's some islands in Dalla and Shusha, and there's, uh, Oxagon, which is a development, area for industrial zone. So it's quite a large region and, uh, we have to do it. building it up virtually from scratch. And at this stage of the game, uh, we're just laying all the infrastructure for transmission and distribution and storage.

And then we head into the distribution.

[00:03:10] Piers Clark: Okay. So it's essentially a blank sheet of paper in a pristine environment in the Northwest of, of Saudi Arabia. It's got coral reefs. It's got glorious mountains. And the job there is to build the world's first truly environmental city that, um, that will have all of these things.

So the line is this half a mile wide, half a mile high, many miles long city. If I, I get, I'm probably simplifying it a bit, but that's the sort of ambition of it. Um, so blank sheet of paper, pristine environmental area. How, how many people is the city expected to serve when, when it's fully created.

[00:03:50] Gavin van Tonder: Well, as you can imagine, this is a very, very long term project, only planned to finish in, you know, past 2015 or 2018, and destined for around 9 million people in the whole region.

So it's going to be here and under construction for a very long time. And, you know, our focus is, is, as you said, on sustainability, circular economy, fully renewable energy system. Um, and looking off of the environment, and we only plan to build on 5 percent of the land, actually, in Saudia

[00:04:17] Piers Clark: yeah, okay, that's another, sorry, that's another one of the magic facts that I keep forgetting, that 5 percent of the land is the only bit that's going to be built upon, other than, as we see in most cities, it's 95 percent and 5 percent left for sort of scrub. Okay, so we get the sense of your backgrounds from the water sector, but the technology side.

And the scale, you must have, I assume you were sold on the dream, not because there's, you know, it wasn't that here's something that's up and running. It was, we need someone with the skill set to help build this, help fill this blank canvas. That was essentially the pitch to you in 2018.

[00:04:53] Gavin van Tonder: Yes, that's correct.

I mean, the whole intent was to start from scratch and build it out. Let's say a digital water utility focused on bringing all the expertise from around the world. So it's not just one person. So, you know, the job was to hire all the people that I thought could come and bring their knowledge to this.

So there's of course people from water utilities, there's people from technology providers etc. So we are around 200.

[00:05:18] Piers Clark: You've been playing the equivalent of, water industry fantasy football haven't you? You've been finding the best people around the world that you can pull in and put into particular roles and positions.

[00:05:29] Gavin van Tonder: That's 100 percent correct. And for that, for some of the people that are probably going to be listening to this, I do apologize for stealing some of the best people.

[00:05:37] Piers Clark: Excellent. All right. We promised that this was going to be about how to prepare a water utility for 100 percent renewable energy now, I think there isn't a utility on the planet that isn't aspiring to increase their amount of renewables.

You've started, of course, you've had the benefit of a blank sheet of paper. Um, you haven't had to deal with legacy assets, but let's get to the topic of how do you prepare to be 100 percent renewables as a utility? What did you do?

[00:06:07] Gavin van Tonder: So this is, you know, this is one of the key questions that we had, given that, renewable energy when you have sun and when you have wind, is very low cost when you don't have sun and wind.

It's very, very high cost. And the problem is, if you're fully renewable energy, you don't have a base load of gas or a base load of coal or base load of oil to be able to support. So, yeah, so, you know, of course, everyone has diesel generators as backup in case of failure. But at the end of the day, you're operating 100 percent renewable energy.

You're gonna have to plan accordingly. The other aspect of that is that given that you know the future will be 100 percent renewable energy and water can act as an enormous battery. If you pump it up and we have mountains that are 2. 5 km high inside NEOM. And a lot of the range runs along the coast.

So we have high mountains that enables us to utilize water as a battery and be able to generate energy when we need it, for example, using pumped hydro. So, it was important for us also to look at our infrastructure and say, if it is going to be renewable energy and you are going to have time and use pricing.

How do you protect yourself against the, very high costs of energy when there's no wind and no solar? So that was, key for us to design infrastructure out that we took all of that into account.

[00:07:24] Piers Clark: Okay. So it's about understanding the assets you've got. That you can play with, because, okay, so you you're not using wave, are you, uh, power?

You're not using any hydropower?

[00:07:35] Gavin van Tonder: We are, uh, looking at wave technologies. We have two, companies actually that are doing, that came to us with innovation. They are now working inside NEOM, with wave technologies and they are, one of them is using buoys that float in the sea with fronds. And another one is positioning them against the marinas and that in order to generate.

But this, this kind of energy that you generate is very, very small and localized.

[00:08:04] Piers Clark: I'm going to come to a minute. I'm going to ask you the question about how much comes from solar, how much comes from the different sources. But, I think the first point you're making is is understand absolutely the assets you've got that you can play with.

If you've got mountains and reservoirs at height, you've got the ability to create a battery. If you're in a sunny area of the world, you've obviously got the ability for solar. If you're near a coastline, you've got the ability for wave. If you've got rivers, you can do things with in river turbines. And then you've obviously got to map your needs, against those to, uh, to make sure you maximize the return you're going to get.

And in NEOM, it's mostly solar and wind and then using the reservoir as a battery. Uh, are you doing anything with floating solar on your, your water body is the sea, isn't it? So doing floating solar is a bit, bit of a challenge there. It's, it's got to be wave. Energy.

[00:08:56] Gavin van Tonder: Yes, the sea is not really conducive to us doing floating.

So that because it's what can be quite windy along the Gulf of Ecuador. And so it's not really beneficial to have floating solar. And also, in order to maintain the environment that we want, we're not really allowed to put too much energy into it. We don't have any surface water to be able to utilize floating swathes of land solar.

So, uh, we do look at floating solar, maybe for the pumped hydro ponds or reservoirs that we would use. Um, but in essence, we don't have any surface water to be able to utilize floating solar, so it will be land solar and, uh, you know, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is burning full steam ahead on huge swathes of land solar.

[00:09:40] Piers Clark: Yeah. And when you build solar on the land, does that count as part of your five percent?

[00:09:46] Gavin van Tonder: It's a very good question. Depending on the impact it has on the environment, if it's not impacting the environment, then it doesn't count as the five percent. But in fact, most of the solar, in the longer term will be built outside of the new environment and, in the kingdom because we have large swathes of land on the kingdom available for that.

[00:10:04] Piers Clark: Excellent. And now tell me about, what about, um, energy that you might be able to generate from your operational practices, such as biogas from, uh, fermenting sewage sludge, or indeed in pipe, uh, hydro generation in your water network. Are either of those being looked at?

[00:10:23] Gavin van Tonder: Uh, yes. So for every waste water treatment plant, we have zero liquid and zero solid discharge.

We have to implement, energy recovery from every waste water treatment plant. And we have to have storage facilities so that it can be utilized, in towns when the tariff is very, very high. So that's, that, that is implemented. And then very much like Hong Kong, Hong Kong actually does some impact, energy generation.

So we are following that route. As you can imagine, we have a building that's 500 m high. Yeah, we have a lot of energy there that's available for us to generate. So it's very, very important that we integrate, uh, impact. And I

[00:11:03] Piers Clark: tend to regard them as recovery rather than generation, because you've got to pump the water up to the top, but it does give you the ability to recover back some of the energy that you've spent, rather than the genuine generation, which is obviously what, what solar would be.

All right, tell me roughly the proportions. I get that it'll vary month to month, day to day, season to season, hour to hour, but the proportions, is it, is it 80 percent solar and the rest covers is 20 percent or what's the mix?

[00:11:33] Gavin van Tonder: Well, it depends on on the timing because it's going to be a very, very long project.

So, uh, at the moment, I think it's, uh, you know, I'm not into the energy generation exactly because it moves around quite a bit about land availability and what they develop out first. At this point in time, I think it's around 60 percent solar and 25 percent is wind. And then they're looking at long, long duration energy storage batteries as well.

And we plan to build a two gigawatt Pumped hydro scheme as well. So that will also come in at a later state. So it depends on the timing about, which is where, uh, you know, is very difficult because if you don't know, Which is going to come online when, and it's difficult for you, so you've got to be able to be flexible in your planning.

[00:12:24] Piers Clark: So now we come to the key question, which is, I get there's lots of variations, there's lots of things that can be done. But the key question is, how much has this cost you extra, um, in terms of real cold hard cash, but also there's Delaying the projects and slowing things down because you're waiting for new technology or finding the right expertise.

What's the, what's been the biggest challenge in aiming to be 100 percent renewable?

[00:12:48] Gavin van Tonder: Have is that we don't have a, you know, the full population and it grows It's going to keep growing over time. So For example, one of our big energy consumers, of course, will be the desalination plant.

So preparing the desalination plants in the beginning for a large population enables you to only run the desalination plant when you have renewable energy available to you. And because it's reverse osmosis, you can shut down trains whenever you want to, and make sure you do it in the proper manner. You can have a large desalination plant that only operates when you have renewable energy and then and then stop it from operating. And then as the population grows, obviously it will fill that gap of you being able to only operate it at certain times. But and then you start off building the next trains, but the fact that the population is growing over time enables you to build larger things and operate only when you have renewable energy.

And the same is said for storage facilities. We build a storage facility for a population of, let's say, 500, 000 people at this. And that gives you a storage of five days in the beginning, that may be a storage of two weeks. And you only pump into that storage tank. When you have renewable energy, and then you deplete it in order just to keep the five days So you would think that you would be spending a lot of money You are spending money more money up front, but you're planning for population growth and that gives you the opportunity to be able to adjust your energy consumption

[00:14:16] Piers Clark: Excellent.

All right, Kevin. Thank you very much for that window into what you're doing in Saudi Arabia itself It's a fantastically ambitious project and, uh, you should be rightly proud of the role you've taken over the last six years of taking what was someone else's dream and turning it into a genuine reality today.

And this is going to be a project that outlives yourself and your children and grandchildren. Um, and with that in mind, let's just finish with what's the best advice you can give? You've been given what advice would you give a young Gavin Vantonda?

[00:14:50] Gavin van Tonder: Oh, I think when we are young, we always think we know everything and we always put you know Fixed on that.

We think we're doing the right thing at the right time all the time But I think what we fail to do is recognized what what the older generation that have actually done and learned from. And, one of the one of the key things was even if you're young and you think you know better, never discount what the experience that people have had in the industry, uh, because , that experience has actually brought us into NEOM, not just myself, other 200 other people have brought that experience in Europe, uh, in order to make sure that we try and do it right for the future and that we, uh, we do it in a sustainable manner.

[00:15:36] Piers Clark: Brilliant. Thank you very much, Gavin. You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with Piers Clark. I've been talking to Gavin van Tonder from NEOM. Please join us next time. Goodbye.