'Have a plan. Have a back up plan. And have a back up back up plan' with Harry Sachinis, CEO, EYDAP, Greece

[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 other water sector leaders from around the globe. My name is Piers Clark and my guest today is Harry Sachinis from EYDAP, the Athens Water and Wastewater Treatment Company.
[00:00:19] Piers Clark: Harry, wonderful to have you with us today.
[00:00:21] Harry Sachinis: Great to be here. Thank you, Piers, for inviting me.
[00:00:24] Piers Clark: Now, you've been Chief Executive of EYDAP for six years. How did you get to the role you are in today?
[00:00:30] Harry Sachinis: I actually started from Greece. I'm a mechanical industrial engineer, got my MBA at Harvard Business School in the United States and stayed in the United States for 27 years. I specialized in global information for energy, aerospace and defense, and construction. So, I was running the largest companies in that space. After 27 years in the US, I came back to Greece because I had a very interesting proposal to run the Greek gas company, called DEPA. I did that for about five years and then, I moved from gas to liquids. And, here I am, the CEO of EYDAP.
[00:01:03] Piers Clark: So, before you joined EYDAP, you'd not worked in water and wastewater?
[00:01:08] Harry Sachinis: That is correct, but don't forget that gas has networks. So, it was a very smooth and interesting transition. Even the regulatory framework that we're using for water in Greece is pretty much exactly the same as the regulatory framework that we're using for energy.
[00:01:24] Harry Sachinis: And again, when I was working for the construction information company in the US, I learned a lot about water infrastructure projects that were existing and in water, after people, energy is one of the biggest costs that you have in the operation. So, it all comes together and it's actually quite exciting to get all that information and the experience and put it together and apply it to the water business.
[00:01:46] Piers Clark: The excitement's coming through. I'm sensing it down the microphone. Now, EYDAP serves Athens, so we know where it serves. What we don't know is how many people it covers and what sort of assets you've got. Can you color that in for me? Tell me a bit more about the services you provide.
[00:02:00] Harry Sachinis: Sure. Athens is a city of about 5 million people. We serve about 2.2 million households with water that comes from the mountains about 300 kilometers away and comes with gravity. We currently have four reservoirs and the canals that bring the water to the city. We have four water treatment plants, 14,000 kilometers of water pipes. We have five wastewater treatment plants, and about, 10,000 kilometers of wastewater pipes. And we're building another 1,400 kilometers of wastewater pipes on the eastern side of the city. It's quite difficult because you have to weave through all the fiber networks and everything else that is in a modern city.
[00:02:47] Piers Clark: Yeah. You mentioned you've got five wastewater treatment works, and we're going to come to talking about one of them because I believe you've got the second largest in Europe and some plans to make that net zero on energy generation. But before we get to that. I'd like to just start on the water supply side.
[00:03:02] Piers Clark: The thing that everyone knows about Athens, is it's one of these great ancient cities. It's been around for millenia. And here you are, using, I'm sure some of the infrastructure that dates back over those millennia, that getting the water down from the mountains to the city, I assume is what the Romans were doing. Maybe using slightly different aqueducts, but this must have been a similar process, I assume. Just talk me through some of the challenges that come with running a city that is ancient, not just medieval, but properly ancient.
[00:03:32] Harry Sachinis: We are indeed using a Roman aqueduct about 26 kilometers long to bring water to the city and that existed about 2,000 years ago. We are dealing with the drought because now this old aqueduct is really only a drop in the bucket because Greece has increased significantly in population since the ancient times.
[00:03:52] Harry Sachinis: A lot of the infrastructure in Athens was built in the sixties. So now you have old pipes with increased tear and wear. So, we have about a 200 million Euro plan for replacing the pipes in the areas where they break most and we have investment plan to be ahead of the curve because we want to reduce our NRW.
[00:04:11] Harry Sachinis: Our actual losses are about 15%, a little bit lower than the average from Europe, which is about 23%, and we want to take it down to around 10 to 12%.
[00:04:23] Harry Sachinis: Now that's important, because we had significant drought for three years and if this continues for another two years, there're going to be significant issues. So, we have the base plan, backup plan. And backup plan to the backup plan. So, the base plan is actually an interesting idea, connecting our farther most reservoir to a reservoir that is currently used for hydroelectric power, and it is only 30 kilometers away that we can access through the mountains, through a series of three small, 10 kilometer tunnels.
[00:04:56] Harry Sachinis: The great thing about that is the capacity of that reservoir is five times the capacity of all of our reservoirs together. Most of that water will come with gravity, so relatively low cost.
[00:05:08] Piers Clark: Surely, it's the drilling of a 30 mile long tunnel through the mountain that's going to be multi-billions.
[00:05:13] Harry Sachinis: Actually, not multi-billions. Because 96 years ago when we had the first reservoir for Athens, we built a tunnel to bring the water here that was 20 kilometers long. 50 years ago when we built the farther reservoir, we built 56 kilometers of tunnels. 30 years ago, when we built yet another reservoir, another 30 kilometers of tunnels. The great thing here is with all the other projects, you had to build a reservoir as well.
[00:05:39] Harry Sachinis: Here in this case, you just have to build the tunnel. It's about a half a billion project and the cost per cubic meter of that is 10 to 15 cents. And that's important to know because the backup plan to that is desalination, which is 10 times that.
[00:05:55] Harry Sachinis: And the backup plan to that is bringing from a river that is, again, about 300 kilometers away using big tankers. There are lots of Greek ship owners and they own tankers so we could leave some of those big tankers to bring raw water to our canal, basically bypassing this tunnel that we want to create.
[00:06:13] Piers Clark: Now, you are three years into a drought, and in two years’ time, if the drought continues, you'll be in dire straits. How long will it take to get the tunnel?
[00:06:22] Harry Sachinis: That's why we have the other plans. if you combine those actions with reducing the consumption, all of that, make the two years into five years and the five years, you can build the tunnel.
[00:06:34] Harry Sachinis: The tunnel itself because of the experience that we have will take about two years to build. The whole idea is making sure that you can prepare all the studies and all the technical studies and be ready to drill.
[00:06:44] Piers Clark: Seldom have I heard a chief exec speak with such confidence bearing mind the potential looming catastrophe. It's great that you've got this sort of confidence around the plan base plan, backup plan, backup, backup plan.
[00:06:58] Harry Sachinis: The plans build the confidence. It's not me having the confidence.
[00:07:01] Piers Clark: Right. Well, let's now go to the wastewater side. You mentioned the extension of the network that you are doing for the western side of Athens. How many people are served currently? That would imply that not everybody's got a sewer network. Is that what you are correcting? Is that why the new network?
[00:07:16] Harry Sachinis: Yes, we are building wastewater network and five wastewater treatment plants. Actually, two of them are already running and we're building another three. There's a tender going on for the second one, a tender that is being completed for the first one of those three, and then another one that we're going to be coming out with a tender in the next year or so.
[00:07:38] Piers Clark: And this will bring a hundred percent of the population in that part into the sewer network.
[00:07:42] Harry Sachinis: Correct like 90% to 95% into the sewer network. And we're going to be recycling all the water and using it for irrigation mainly.
[00:07:50] Harry Sachinis: And also in that area, we're going to be using some of the recycled water for the data center they're building
[00:07:55] Harry Sachinis: We have a master plan for the eastern side of Athens. We are building now a master plan for the rest of Athens because we have 300 million cubic meters of water that right now it's clean water and we throw it into the sea. Okay, let's bring that water back, maybe if it makes financial and economic sense, use it as recycled water for the needs and replace potable water with recycled water if the cost is lower than the cost of 15 cents that I mentioned of the water that comes from the mountains.
[00:08:26] Piers Clark: So, I wanted to touch on three topics. We've done two of them. The first is around your water supply resilience program. The second was around the extension of the wastewater network. The third one, however, is the one that's around the second largest wastewater treatment plant in Europe. Tell us what you're doing there and why that's so exciting.
[00:08:44] Harry Sachinis: So, Psyttalia is the second largest wastewater treatment plant in Europe. It's on an island, so you have finite space, so you cannot do different studies. You cannot build everything there. So, you have to do all that together to figure out how you're going to place it on that little island. So, one of the things is take the water to four stage processing according to the European directives, and that's going to take some space. And the other thing is, instead of right now just using all the biogas to dry the sludge because we have already used thermal hydrolysis to increase the dry solids, we want to incinerate a piece of the biogas with the relatively dry sludge and produce the optimal amount of electricity and gas so that we can maximize the money that we can make by selling that in order to take that amount and lower tariffs to our consumers.
[00:09:42] Piers Clark: And you believe that this site, which is not small, this site could become energy net generative?
[00:09:48] Harry Sachinis: Correct, correct. We've seen smaller, similar sites in different parts of the world. And actually, that's where we got the idea. For example, Hamburg. So, we want to do that at a bigger scale. And we think it is possible, and it is going to be challenging, but really, really interesting.
[00:10:05] Piers Clark: Yeah, you should have a couple of things that work in your favor. One, of course, is the scale. If it works at a smaller scale or something like this, the economics should be even clearer at a bigger scale.
[00:10:14] Piers Clark: The other thing which I'm thinking is that just the temperature of Athens, the ambient temperature must mean that it's easier to get to a dryer cake that's going to combust than it would be if you were in say, Norway. Common sense would suggest that, but I wonder.
[00:10:28] Harry Sachinis: I'd rather leave chemical engineering experts and the other experts figure out how to do that. But it brings up an interesting point, if I may say that, because of drought, everyone's thoughts are how to reduce water consumption. But we want to figure out, and especially this connection to this large reservoir that we want to accomplish together with the water that we might get from Psyttalia. Together, these two could bring more water to the Athens area. The reason why I'm saying it's very important because if you have more water, you can have more green. If you have more green, you can lower the temperature.
[00:11:01] Harry Sachinis: Actually, we have other projects trying to test the hypothesis: if you lower the temperature in Athens, you will have savings of energy, which are real cost savings, which may be larger than the cost of building the infrastructure to bring water here or to do all the things we talked about.
[00:11:20] Piers Clark: That is an inspiring point to finish on, and we always like to finish with a question. What advice would you give a young Harry, if you could go back 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, you, choose how far you want to go back, but what advice would you give a young Harry?
[00:11:36] Harry Sachinis: Well, I've learned, over my career is that don't try to recreate everything. Use best practices, figure out what they're doing around the world, learn from that and build on that because based on that, you can have smarter, faster, better ideas.
[00:11:52] Piers Clark: Thank you. You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Harry Sachinis, the Chief Executive for EYDAP in Athens. I hope you can join us next time. Thank you.