'A project of the year.' New Miami-Dade facility helps keep wastewater out of the sea

Alex Harris, Miami Herald on Jan 16, 2025

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MIAMI — Miami-Dade is a significant step closer to a state-mandated goal of re-using its wastewater, rather than pouring the partially treated stuff into the sea.

On Wednesday, the county and Florida Power & Light debuted the FPL Miami-Dade Clean Water Recovery Center, a brand-new facility designed to take a big chunk of the county’s wastewater, treat it and use it to cool off power-generation components at the Turkey Point plant.

County and FPL leaders touted the project as a win-win, a way to help the county meet its environmental goals and reduce the amount of water the utility draws from the aquifer.

“It’s not only environmentally friendly to have this project, it’s fiscally responsible,” said Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava at a press conference at the Homestead power plant.

“We’re turning wastewater into a valuable resource,” she said. “Instead of just throwing it away, we’re putting it to work.”

Armando Pimental, CEO of FPL, called the new center “a project of the year,” and a model of a functioning public-private partnership.

In 2008, Florida required Miami-Dade to halt its practice of piping treated wastewater into the ocean by the end of 2025. Simultaneously, Florida has state standards for how much treated wastewater local governments have to re-use for other purposes. This project, Levine Cava said, helps with both.

Originally, this project was conceived as a larger plan that would allow FPL to use a portion of this treated wastewater in its aging cooling canals that regulate the twin nuclear power plants on the site and also contributed to an underground plume of super salty water that at one point threatened Miami’s adjacent drinking water wells. At some point in the last two years, plans changed, said Bill Orlove, a senior manager of communications at FPL.

“There was, in the planning stages, an idea of having it assist, as needed, a backup to the Turkey Point nuclear cooling canals,” he said. “The decision was made not to do that.”

The newly built plant has the capacity to clean and re-use an average of 10 million gallons a day of wastewater, or up to 15 million gallons a day.

That takes Miami-Dade another step closer to its goal to re-use 60% of the wastewater it produces a day — a target of about 117 million gallons a day. Before the FPL project came online, the county already re-used about 15 million gallons a day. To get the rest of the way there, the county is building similar systems at three of its wastewater plants that will eventually handle a combined 100 million gallons a day.

Those three projects, two of which are under construction, plus the FPL center, will push Miami-Dade over the threshold it’s legally required to meet.

“We’re working around the clock to meet these requirements, with which we wholly agree,” Levine Cava said.

If achieved, this would make Miami-Dade “the number one utility in the state of Florida, as well as the entire eastern coast for industrial water reuse,” said Jennifer L. Messemer-Skold, a spokesperson for the water and sewer department.

Clean enough to water a lawn

Toilets flushed and showers drained in South Miami-Dade end up at the South Dade Wastewater Treatment facility. From there, it gets a first round of cleaning, then a new 8-mile pipe carries it to the Turkey Point campus.

Carlos Santamaria, a senior plant technician at Turkey Point, pointed to the shining new concrete facilities that now handle those millions of gallons every day.

Step one, he said, is cleaning some of the nutrients out of the water. Step two, is sieving the solids out of the slurry. Step three is a final cleaning, with more filters and a dash of cleansing chemicals like chlorine.

The end result is something that’s not clean enough to drink, “but it could be used for irrigation,” said Santamaria. “It doesn’t hurt the environment.”

FPL uses that water to cool off the five natural gas power generators at the Turkey Point campus, which also houses a nuclear power generation facility. Most of the water evaporates into the atmosphere, Santamaria said, and what’s left gets shot 3,500 feet underground into a deep-injection well.

“Whenever we can take a straw out of the system, it’s a good thing,” said Irela Bague, director of governments and water resilience for engineering firm Black & Veatch, which designed the project.