Potential for Conduit Hydropower at NYC's Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant

Abstract

The Newtown Creek facility is New York City's largest wastewater treatment plant, with the capacity to treat up to 2.65 billion liters of combined sewage (rainfall and raw sewage) each day. After treatment at the plant, clean water flows out to the nearby East River via an outfall pipe. On average, the plant treats 810 million liters of combined sewage per day, which means there is potential to extract significant amounts of energy from the water flowing through the outfall. This paper first verifies that hydropower is a viable option at the plant by calculating the theoretical amount of power available from the running water, then determines what type of turbine would be the most appropriate for the outfall, and finally calculates how much electricity could realistically be generated by a turbine in the outfall. The bulb turbine was identified as the most appropriate type of turbine, and it was approximated that a bulb turbine in the outfall could produce, on average, 263 kilowatts of power. Considering that the plant runs year-round, a total of 2.24 gigawatt hours of clean electricity could be generated annually, which could be used to help power the energy-intensive wastewater treatment process or be fed back into New York City's electrical grid, where it could power up to 211 homes annually.