Glenn College Colloquium: Modeling Technology for the Design of Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Regulations

No registration required. Attend in person at Page Hall Room 130 (LEC) or on Zoom by clicking "Join on Zoom". 

The Environmental Protection Agency is empowered by the Clean Water Act (CWA) and Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to design regulations that acknowledge the highly variable nature of water and wastewater across the United States. However, identifying and assessing the variability necessary to justify regulatory flexibility requires technology models and spatially resolved data. In this talk, I show how the use of spatially resolved data as inputs into technology performance and cost models can inform CWA and SDWA regulatory activity. The first case study uses mass-balance models of coal-fired power plants and spatially resolved coal and plant design data to identify wastewater that could potentially require different standards to create economically efficient CWA regulations. The second case study uses technology cost models for drinking water treatment and spatially resolved water cost data to identify drinking water utilities that may lack the financial capability to comply with SDWA regulations on contaminants of emerging concern.

Dr. Daniel B. Gingerich is an Assistant Professor with appointments in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geodetic Engineering and the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering and is a Core Faculty member of the Sustainability Institute at The Ohio State University. At Ohio State, his research focuses on modeling the performance, cost, and environmental impact of existing and emerging technologies designed to make our water, energy, and materials systems more sustainable and resilient. He also studies how these technology assessments can improve the design of technology and better inform public and private decision making around our infrastructure and how the social context of infrastructure use can inform technology development and deployment. Before coming to Ohio State, Dr. Gingerich was an Oak Ridge Institute for Science Education post-doctoral research fellow at the National Energy Technology Laboratory and a visiting post-doctoral research associate at Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Gingerich earned his PhD in Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He also holds an MS and BS in Civil Engineering and a BA in Political Science.