Oh! Thanks for the correction.

Electricity was stupid expensive in the 90s in Ontario so it made sense to invest in cogeneration engines to burn digester gas or even natural gas and use the electricity on site. Then electricity got cheaper so it still made sense to burn biogas generated on site to lower your peak demands especially if you were paying time of use or you were Class A and needed to do load shedding. Sometimes you’d even get a discount from the electricity company for running your systems because it meant they could delay increasing the grid.

Now, the financial incentive is for carbon credits. You don’t get those if you burn on site, you just get to buy less taxed fuels. If you instead upgrade the gas to renewable natural gas (like what is described in the article) and put that in the natural gas grid, you can sell the carbon credits to companies who are required to offset their own generation. I think that is where the money is in these schemes.

(That and the tipping costs for food waste, free slowly digesting material to regulate the digesters in the form of the manure, outsourcing the annoying regulatory bits to the farmers, and building goodwill for green data centres)

I promise this isn’t just a well askually but anaerobic digestion (what is being discussed in the article) and composting are different.

Composting requires oxygen. It produces carbon dioxide. It produces heat. Compost has less restrictions for use as a fertilizer than digested mature. I’m not from the US so I don’t want to assume it’s the same across all states but in Canada you can sell it to the public.

Anaerobic Digesters do not require oxygen. It produces carbon dioxide and methane. It requires heat input to occur at a reasonable rate. Use as a fertilizer is restricted because more pathogens survive. Hydrogen sulphide is produced so sometimes ferric chloride is added, and that reduces the amount of phosphorus available to plants.

One of the trade offs with digestion is that processing the digestate into something usable takes additional energy. If it’s a single farm and they are not taking additional feedstock it’s no more nutrients that they had before they started digesting. Chances are they can manage the nutrients on site and don’t need to input energy.

If they are taking stuff from off-site, or if they expended their operation beyond what they can manage on site then they need to choose if they are going to transport it off-site as a liquid, thicken it into cake (mmmmm), or create a fertilizer product like pellets. Each option requires more energy than the last. They may be able to sell the pellets but typically have to give liquid or cake away for free or pay people to take it.

The operation, run by Pennsylvania-based Ag-Grid Energy, is the first of its kind in the country. The company claims the anaerobic digestion of manure and food waste could be a game-changer, not only in powering crypto, but data centers, which currently use 4.9% of the country’s electricity, a figure that could double by 2030.

There are a handful of net energy producing waste treatment processes in the world, and they all achieve it by taking advantage of hyper local opportunities to optimize. They are not infinitely scalable. For example, T. PARK in China takes sludge from several wastewater plants and uses the energy to power one of them.

Further, it is not truly net positive if it leaves residuals that need further treatment.

The project claims to recycle more than 45,000 gallons of food waste per day and the manure of 4,000 cows. “What we want to do is also provide, if possible through fiber optics, [the] value of the AI computing capacity to that same regional area,” Akki says.

The energy isn’t in the manure. Wastewater plants use food waste (co-digestion) to boost methane production of digesters. Some places get the food waste from a municipal green bin program but that’s a giant pain and wastewater plants tend to prefer food waste from food manufacturing. So it’s unclear if this is diverting the food waste from landfill. The best solution would be to reduce the food waste in the first place. Can you call it green if it is the result of over production?

Don’t get me wrong, I am pro-biogas. In municipal wastewater treatment the best results for biogas production come when you direct as much short chain carbon to the digester, which greatly reduces one of the highest electrical loads on the plant (blowers to oxidize carbon).

You’re still burning it though. It looks good on paper because the CO2 emissions don’t count in Canadian GHG reporting because the source is biogenic. Doesn’t change the fact that there are emissions.

The digested waste, or digestate, is meant to be recycled, potentially into a range of products, such as fertilizer and animal bedding.

The energy to turn digestate into a fertilize product is pretty massive. Many of the plants that are energy neutral incinerate and the ash is landfilled.

Digested manure can be more polluting than manure that hasn’t been digested, according to USDA research.

Eeeehhhhh… Technically true but only because people are allowed to operate digesters poorly. I was talking to an engineer in the states who told me his digester was losing 30% of the methane by leaks and I was sitting getting second hand panic but apparently that’s not super illegal? We would have problems with the environmental regulators and the TSSA.

The project intended to send about 41,000 gallons of waste per day into a tributary of Walla Walla Creek, which empties into Lake Michigan.

Excuse me what

There are some high level engineering plans available.

Some highlights:

• daily food waste estimated to be 225 tonnes and it may require on site processing.
• less than half of the digester feed will be manure.
• Digesters are mesophilic meaning they need to be heated to and maintained at ~35 C
• heat for the digester is provided by burning fuel oil 🙃 (most municipal plants burn the biogas)
• gas upgrading is by chilling, filtering and compressing for transport via pipeline. No mention of energy demands.
• the project would add runoff capture for manure storage which didn’t exist before.
• the manure needs to be pretreated before digestion to remove sand
• the project agreement means Vanguard is not responsible for the waste products after the gas is removed.
• the project will create waste with more nutrients than the farm can land apply on their site. (You know, due to the additional food waste). There are therefore no details about what the plan is for the digestate.
• based on a news article it sounded like they wanted to build a pipeline to transport it to other farms for land application. That might be where the waste to the creek idea came from? The pipeline was to go under the creek. Maybe that was just if it broke?
• the enclosed engineering drawings are civil/structural only, no indication of power demand or fuel consumption.

There is also an air pollution permit application available. Additional details about the project include

• two 750 kw emergency generators (diesel powered)
• two natural gas boilers at 4 MMBTU/hr (unclear if this is instead of the fuel oil in the other doc?)
• the pressure relief system was to have a flare, which is positive. It is better to flare gas in an energy versus just venting.

The nutrient management permit application is behind a log in so I can’t see it but this article has statements from Vanguard that contradict the engineering plans.

Hanselman says the company never uses human waste in its digesters, which is how PFAS would enter the equation and that the sources of the other organic food waste would likely be byproducts from dairy processing and beer brewing.

The application included provisions for accepting packaged food. The packaging is where the pfas is.

The process Vanguard’s co-digesters use to clean the digestate on the back end, Hanselman says, allows for nutrients to be removed and taken away. That allows the farm to limit the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen that is spread on the farm’s land. He noted that at the company’s first project in Vermont, they’re removing 12 tons of phosphorus per day from the environment.

This is explicitly untrue for the Waupaca project? Vanguard has no part in digestate treatment. Sometimes there is phosphorus removal during H2S removal (if FeCl is used) but this project used a scrubber. So no nutrient reduction.

I obviously can’t speak for every project, but this example project would increase the amount of nutrients the farm has to manage (because of the trucked in food waste). It would increase energy consumption, and there was no plan for what to do with the digestate. It’s not even clear if there is a net methane release reduction over their previous methods because the carbon in the food is more likely to convert to methane in the digester. The more slow to break down carbon from the manure may still end up on fields.

Food waste digestion needs a less biodegradable feed stock to make the process more stable. In municipal wastewater you balance raw sludge (easily digestible) and secondary sludge (less easily digestible) to ensure the acetogenisis step doesn’t poison the methanogens step.

I don’t see a benefit to the local community in this proposal at all. If they treated the wastewater using energy efficient methods then maybe? But not this project as it was proposed. Vanguard gets the slowly biodegradable material, land to use, to be absolved of responsibility to deal with byproducts. Seems like a bad deal.

Isn’t that what DDG uses?

I don’t agree with that take.

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/how-to-filter-out-ai-images-in-duckduckgo-search-results

We rely on publicly available lists to filter out AI-generated content, like those provided by uBlockOrigin & uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist, an open-source blocklist, manually curated by project contributors.

This is an open source block list, which is manually put together by volunteers. It’s not even reading metadata, presumably because that’s too resource intensive (or proprietary/unreliable).

Gemini was able to tell that was AI because it was able to read the image ID water mark and associated it with how Adobe sequences AI generated images. The image ID is in the file name, but if we wanted to catch it that way the filter would need to work on logic, not just keywords or site lists. Programming a filter to search the file names to identify if it belonged to the sequence would be more complex.

Alternatively, if you clicked though to the image you are immediately told if it is AI. Whenever I search for microbe photos I always click the source to determine if it’s a render or a stylized electron microscope capture, and I figure it’s always been good practice to get the image from the source to verify it’s not totally bullshit either in terms of the the search pulling up something unrelated or the image itself being misleading or even a humorous misrepresentation/meme.

I think it’s important to understand how the tools we rely on work.

Ironically, AI can tell me the adobe images are AI and why they don’t get flagged in image search:

Yes, this image is AI-generated.

While checking the image file shows it was not made using Google AI tools specifically, it bears the official “Adobe Stock” watermark directly over an image ID (961863094) that belongs to Adobe’s generative AI collection.

When downloaded directly from the official Adobe Stock platform, the full-resolution file contains embedded metadata acknowledging it as AI content, but this background data is lost when saving or extracting the preview image.

Fair, the adobe ones are labeled as AI if you click through to the link so that’s a pretty big miss in the search.

Edit: I retract my misinformed comment, I hadn’t looked at how the filter works.

Stock images have always included bullshit renders of microbes so maybe that’s just something I take for granted.

I’m not sure I understand, are you thinking they are all AI? At least some of them are not - I recognize them from the before times. Tardigrade images have always been goofy looking.

The adobe stock images are AI though. It’s probably a safe bet to avoid stock image sites although Alamy seems to have some good ones. Adding the photography filter helps a bit too, but I still got some stock images used on other websites.

I think it was more than likely an innocent mistake. I’m sure we’ve all misinterpreted things in the past. It’s also possible I am mistaken. I’m not in their brain and I might have misread it too.

Like I said, I reached out to the author. If they get back to me and it turns out I was wrong I will correct it here.

Help America? Nothing. I’m not american.

Help utilities in my own country? I’m doing my job, lol.

I started writing the comment below which was going to include a comparison of the text between the two bills but when I pulled up C-37 reference to the UN declaration was still in there? The linked article may be misinterpreting the reporting it references which was written in May before the draft text was published. That article says:

Michael Rosenberg, who represented some 260 First Nations in the class action settled in 2021, said those communities are being shut out by Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty and have not seen a draft of legislation meant to ensure those same First Nations have access to clean drinking water.

Totally valid concerns, but again this was before the text was published. It has now been published. There is nothing in this article saying the rights based language has been removed.

I think he article linked in this post may have misinterpreted this passage:

She did not explain how the new bill will affirm the right to clean water after the passage of legislation in June that speeds up the approval timeline for major infrastructure projects and gives cabinet the ability to sidestep some environmental laws.

That was a specific question related to how the new bill will interact with a different bill. It has nothing to do how C-37 may differ from C-61. I think this is a significant error in the article linked here. I will submit an error report.

I’m not defending the feds. I’m going to leave the rest of the comment I started writing which is my opinion of how the inclusion of the rights based language may be important symbolically, but is only in the preamble, and plays no role in the actionable and inforcable sections.

Original comment:

The failure of the federal government to meet their obligations to indigenous communities is genocidal, full stop. Don’t tell me the feds can run complex and dispersed military programs, train new recruits as soldiers, but can’t set up sustainable water programs.

While I’m glad this is in the news by whatever means, I do take issue with the framing for two reasons:

1. That text has only symbolic power
2. It frames it as an issue caused by this government and not hundreds of years of genocide.

It is valid to point out that it removes language from a bill that had at least some input from the communities it serves, which is certainly a big fuck you to the people who have given their energy to crafting it.

The article doesn’t include the details so I will put it here. From the old bill (C-61), the only possibly actionable references are the following:

From Section 5 (Purpose):

*United Nations Declaration

(3) The making of any decision under this Act is to be guided by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the principle, referred to in the Declaration , of free, prior and informed consent as well as Article 10, paragraph 2 of Article 29 and paragraph 2 of Article 32 of the Declaration. *

Not “shall”, but “is to be”. I’m not a legal expert so not sure where that falls on the Shall to Should spectrum, but as it is in the Purpose section it’s not especially binding.

The only thing in the original bill that the government is required to do is “make best efforts” to start consultations and cooperation by different time limits specified in the different sections. (Which by the way makes it even more infuriating that a choice was made to call an election before this bill was passed, surely the other parties could have been asked to support the government until it could be passed?)

I will also point out that the sections on funding (Section 27(3), Section 30 ) makes no reference to water as a human right.

I’m not saying laterals have no nutrients, but the concentration and type of nutrients are very different between laterals and septic tanks.

Sewage in laterals is pretty dilute. Septic tanks (the tank, not the drain fields) are where the solids collect. They break down a bit over time and particulate forms of nutrients become soluble and more easily taken up by plants.

The sewage in the fields is also generally more strong than sewage that goes to municipal or shared systems because it’s passing though the tank and taking up some of those newly solubilized nutrients on the way to the field.

The tree is absolutely going to get less water when it’s repaired, but I’d be doubtful that the nutrient level will change all that much.

U.S. officials have testified about People’s Republic of China (PRC) hackers’ capability and intent to be able to disrupt domestic infrastructure by 2027. This targeting of critical infrastructure by PRC army units creates leverage in a potential conflict, as the disruption of civilian life could impair policymakers’ capacity for rapid response in a crisis. While we cannot control the PRC’s strategic aims, we can reinforce the resilience of our communities.

UnDisruptable27’s mission is to bridge this preparedness gap by equipping communities on the front lines with the information, tools, and support they need to mitigate the impacts of increasingly complex and cascading infrastructure disruptions. By empowering local leadership, infrastructure operators, and everyday Americans with accessible, actionable insights, UnDisruptable27 aims to enhance national resilience… starting at the local level.

Wow. I’m actually speechless. I don’t even know where to start. I feel like I’m going fucking crazy some times.

I thought it was widely accepted that the US was involved in Stuxnet?

Why focus on China and future capability and not the serious threats that have existed for almost 30 years? Like the incident in 2000 with a disgruntled former employee from an Australian water utility who used remote access to fuck things up. Or that time in 2013 that Iran logged in to the SCADA system of a Dam in New York? Or in 2023 when Iran left anti-Isreal messages on the HMI of a water utility in Pennsylvania? All the reminders of Russia capabilities and history of attacks that were published in 2022?

Where in their plan are they going to bully local politicians into properly funding water infrastructure? Oh, they think we need "clear, actionable step"s? Like the Roadmap to Secure Control Systems in the Water Sector published by the AWWA in 2009? Or their Water Sector CybersecurityRisk Management Guidance (2014)? Or other tools used to support the 2018 requirement for utilities that serve >3300 people to complete risk and resilience assessments and emergency response plans and certify their completeness with the US EPA? And how this same law mandates that US EPA provide guidance to smaller systems too? Like how the US EPA offers free cyber security evaluations, including risk mitigation templates and guidance on overcoming discovered vulnerabilities?

Armed with success stories and blueprints, U27 will get ahead of supply chain and other dependencies that would prevent this approach from scaling to the 6,000 hospital communities nationwide and beyond.

There is no way anyone involved in this has opened up a PLC cabinet in a water utility.

In my experience it is super location dependent. I’ve worked with municipalities who had shit locked down and others that made me think I was getting punked. All in Ontario.

I joined the industry in the early 2010s and it was a hot topic then too. This was when Stuxnet was in the news. ISA published Industrial Automation and Control Systems Security standards (ISA99) in 2002. It’s not new.

I wonder how connected the folks who make decisions about utility cyber security are to each other. I learned almost everything I know about SCADA security practices via people I met through provincial wastewater industry associations and just letting them infodump lol. I don’t know that any of the municipal SCADA people I worked with were members or participated. Maybe they are just trying to go at it alone vs collaborating and learning from each other. You don’t know what you don’t know!

I’d also be interested to know how old the PLCs at that plant were. We have zero details about this attack but when the Rockwell/AB exploit was in the news people were talking about buying cards off eBay because they are using discontinued PLCs. Can you imagine?

So, even if the staff understands the risk it doesn’t mean they are getting enough money to do anything about it. Utilities are so underfunded. It’s another ticking time bomb along with all those neglected pipes in the ground.

You might just be venting but:

If you are actually interested in development applications in Ottawa and why they are rejected, that info is available in the development application search on the City of Ottawa website. Look in “post application” as the status.

The story is the same across Ontario. Applications for amendments to the Official Plans so developers can build outside of places that have established infrastructure. Strong mayor powers don’t magically make sewers appear where there aren’t any.

The Official Plan is public and shows developers where they can build based on available infrastructure capacity. Developers who own land outside these areas make an application and changes to the planning act mean the province will likely approve these applications (at the Ontario Planning Board) and force cities to try and catch up with infrastructure. Oh, and they force cities to lower development fees so there is no money to build it either.

Something to think about when you read about the undersized infrastructure in Ottawa over the next few days.

(Also this isn’t new, it’s about the pushback the new powers got during consultation. It came into force May 1, 2025).

I don’t think we are going to see eye to eye on this. We are reading the quotes differently. I’ll try one more time.

All from this article: https://thecitizen.com/2026/05/14/the-qts-water-story-is-real-its-just-not-about-qts/

And referencing this letter: https://protectpwc.org/2026/05/05/13786/

There are actually three meters:

• 8" domestic, not given a meter number, on Tyrone road.
• 10" fireline (23006232), highway 54
• 10" fireline (23006231), Tyrone road

The letter says the 8" domestic was installed without inspection, and that the fireline on highway 54 was not hooked up to the account and the fire line on Tyrone road was using more water than allowed and therefore a higher rate will be charged. That’s 27.5 MG unbilled and 13.2 million at the ‘wrong’ rate.

Rapson, Tigert’s boss and the county’s top appointed official, has now told The Citizen on the record that the central claim in that letter is not accurate. County staff did inspect the meter at installation.

This accounts for the 'illegal hookup". The “central claim” is that there was a meter that was not inspected. This person has indicated that the meter was inspected.

Tigert herself has hedged her own letter publicly. She told E&E News, the Politico-owned outlet that broke the national story, “I may have hit ‘send’ too soon.” She acknowledged in the same piece that her staff may have known about the hookups, but that she had not been able to locate the inspection report.

She did not know about the hook up and inspection. She assumed there was no inspection because she could not locate the report.

I was wrong about the leak audits, I was looking at the wrong line of the reports. I will correct my comments.

I can see how you could read it like that but it has been further clarified:

Rapson, Tigert’s boss and the county’s top appointed official, has now told The Citizen on the record that the central claim in that letter is not accurate. County staff did inspect the meter at installation. Rapson’s exact words were, “It’s not like they put a meter in, threw a camel net over it, and we didn’t know they put the meter in.”

The same quote, without explicitly stating the meter was inspected, could be ambiguous. Further:

“Tigert herself has hedged her own letter publicly. She told E&E News, the Politico-owned outlet that broke the national story, “I may have hit ‘send’ too soon.” She acknowledged in the same piece that her staff may have known about the hookups, but that she had not been able to locate the inspection report.”

The letter was such a mess. You can’t use private fire fighting lines for non fire fighting purposes. It makes no sense the conversation would just be “oh we didn’t bill you”, not “you need to stop.”

The following section was incorrect, I was looking at the wrong line on the audit spreadsheet.

(Begin correction)

The board’s meeting minutes are similarly goofy.

The person who wrote this has no clue what they are talking about. The cost per unit water doubled because half the water production was unbilled. Their “leakage index” was 7.01 in 2024, up from 3.46 in 2023.

(End correction)

YIKES

They haven’t met since March.

Tl;dr: the utility clarified there was no unauthorized connection, and wow they are absurdly understaffed I’m not surprised this is such a mess

It has been clarified that the hookup wasn’t without the knowledge of the utility, it was a failure of a new transmitter/verifying they were getting readings.

https://thecitizen.com/2026/05/11/behind-fayettes-qts-water-controversy-a-missed-meter-8000-workers-and-a-massive-construction-project/

I work in this realm and as soon as I read the quotes from the utility in the first batch of articles it was immediately clear that people who didn’t have all the information were responding to inquiries. Your average utility employee, even in admin functions have zero media training. If I had a penny for every time I had to deal with the fallout of some ambitious comment that was taken out of context by the media or public, I’d have several pennies.

Statewide, between 2010 and 2015, the estimated water use by hog farmers increased 116 percent (from 2.26 to 4.9 MGD). Within the livestock category, the greatest water use could be found in beef (15 MGD) and dairy (9.6 MGD) operations. The water use estimates for goats, sheep, horses, and broiler chickens all declined. The region with the greatest increase in animal water use (by percentage) was in the Altamaha region, and the greatest decline in animal water use was in the Coastal region.

https://www.gawater.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GWC_Watering_GA_Report.pdf

The three named uses add up to 29.5 MLD, which is 129% the total capacity of the Lafayette water system production capacity. 😬