Jo Anna Ordonez with Water Tech, Inc.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS Elevotec, ERP solutions, business intelligence, digital transformation, PowerGen, water treatment, boiler and cooling, zero liquid discharge, Power Generation, data centers, water scarcity, regulatory environment, chemical engineering, industrial water, Water Tech. 00:00 Hey, it's Scott Mackenzie, your industrial friend, and I want to bring your attention to a great company, Elevotec. Elevotec is transforming how businesses manage assets and operations with powerful ERP, EAM, and business intelligence solutions.

They deliver streamlined processes, real ROI, and over 20 years of proven expertise. If you want technology that actually drives performance, not complexity, Elevotec has you covered. Learn more at El votec.com Elevotec: Empowering Your Digital Transformation with Clarity, Expand, and ROI.

Check them out at El votec.com 00:48 Welcome to the Industrial Talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting-edge, industry-focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving, so put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go. Alright, 01:06 once again, welcome to Industrial Talk.

Thank you very much for joining the number one industrial-related podcast in the universe, and thank you for your continued support. We celebrate industry professionals because you're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you're solving problems each and every day. You are making the world a better place. That's why we celebrate you on Industrial Talk, and that's why we are here to help you succeed in a big way to get that message out.

We want you to tell your story. We are broadcasting here PowerGen San Antonio, Texas, and it is a great show, it's bigger, stronger, faster, it is everything that you want in a show, and then some. You have a tremendous amount of people that are wandering around that have incredible talent in solving your challenges. If you're in the world of Power Generation, if you are thinking about getting in the world of Power Generation, if you are supporting Power Generation, and you're not here, you're missing out.

Put this on your calendar for 2027 and you will not be disappointed. You know why you won't be disappointed. You get to meet people like Jo Anna Orthodonias. Water Tech is the company, and we're going to be talking a little bit about, well, Jo Anna, we're going to be talking about Water Tech.

We're going to be doing everything we can to make sure that she gets her story out and told in a way that's just absolutely moving. She's gonna bring tears to your eyes. Let's get great. You having a good show?

02:30 I'm having a great show. Met some. Hey, there's another person 02:33 he can't hear, but he can hear me yell at him. Another fan just standing over there.

02:38 I got my, my groupies with me. 02:40 Well, yeah, there you go, man. You having a good show? 02:43 I'm having a great, fantastic show.

Met some amazing people today. What do 02:47 you mean? What makes it amazing? 02:50 You know, you have all kinds of people here.

You have people with equipment backgrounds, water backgrounds, power backgrounds. It's amazing. 02:58 Yeah, I.. it's funny.

I've been coming to the show for a number of times, a number of years, and quite frankly, it's a, it's a situation where I see it, it's just gaining greater attention, buzz, the need for solutions, people are complaining because they can't get power fast enough, you know, things like that, and it's just a market that's in a state of flux. I love it. I wish I was younger and being able. Now I just talk about it, and then I realize how much I don't know.

All right, before we get into it, let us have a little background on who Jo Anna is. 03:33 Sure, so you know I work for Water Tech Incorporated, right here. I have, yeah, I'm actually the Vice President for the Utility Water, which means I run the area of boiler and cooling, everything around strategy, sales formulations, you name it. So, just helping the sales team really grow everything in boiler and cooling, but here specifically at PowerGen is working with everyone around the power space, and really my background is I'm a chemical engineer, started my career back in the early 1990s in the actual industrial space I know, and so I've been around for a little bit, but I have worked for some of the major industrial water treatment companies back in the past, some old names from the past like Betts Dearborn, GE Water, Salinas, now Water Tech, so it's been a great career.

04:21 Well, I'm interested to talk a little bit about that, because we have specifically, for the past three days, been talking around just Power Generation. Yes, that's that's been the topic, and, and you know what else has been a topic, data centers. Yep, that's been a topic, and I don't think that we're we're showing enough love for anything dealing with water, but that's an important component, and we need to show more love. 04:45 I am absolutely 100% So, 04:48 with that said, water, and the just how important it is, specifically in the world of Power Generation, take us through why it's important.

What role does Water Tech play? 05:02 So, you know, Water Tech has been around for about 33 years, and we do everything from municipal water treatment through end to end. And when I say that, we treat the water coming into a power plant as far as clarifying the water that they're going to use to begin, and then use it in the boiler, use it in a cooling system, and then we treat everything that they discharge or do not discharge and use that as wastewater and clean that up before it leaves or even in a zero liquid discharge facility, zero 05:30 liquid discharge facility.

What does that mean? That means zero liquid discharge says that I just sort of ran into that, my nose is bloody. That means 05:39 they cannot discharge any water whatsoever, and they're limited by what they can cycle up or how many solids they can have in the water, and they have to be very careful as to what they add to the water. So, in that instance, we have to be very careful about the different chlorides and sulfates and things that build up in that water with that.

06:00 If I have a zero discharge, and I still have things in my water, and I need to, you know, deal if they're there. I wonder, what do you do? You just, you do 06:09 you either minimize what you put into it, which is something we can help with, by the way, or you crystallize it all, and then make a brine out of it, and crystallize it, and get rid of it as salt, and discharge it that way, so landfill evaporated. Yep, you landfill the salt and evaporate off the water and reuse the water that you have now distilled and reuse it back in the system.

So you're pretty much recycling that water over and over and over again. If you can, 06:35 that's a lot of work, 06:36 a lot of work, and a lot of energy, a lot of 06:39 work and a lot of energy, that's an understatement. Mike, absolutely. 06:45 So, what are the challenges that you're seeing specifically in this, this just active market of Power Generation 06:53 right now?

What are we 06:55 doing? 06:55 You know, it's a big push for what can we do to one save water, like you said, water is a big component of everything that's used for Power Generation, and right now it's how much can we save. Water, as you know, is a very scarce resource in the world today, and more and more, because of not only population but of the data centers and everything else that's going up in the world. We need more water, and water has become one of those resources that we just don't have a finite source of, right?

So there is not the availability, so we're looking at power plants, looking at how can I use more and more of that water over and over and over again. How can I make the best of maybe a water source that was not thought of in the past, like a gray water source, like you know, discharge from a sewer plant that might have impurities that were not thought of, we could use in the past. How can I use a water source from a discharge of a scrubber or some other part of the condensate or something from within the power system that we would not have used, because it has other impurities again that can lead to other problems, like growing microbes in the cooling system, or leading to scales.

So that's the challenge that we're seeing now, is how can I reuse all this water that I would not have used and would have discharged in the past as wastewater. 08:15 How do you deal with the fact that, let's say, I have a new plant, I have this new generator. I have this need for more water, and it's, and it's, let's say, I have a data center now. What I think gets overlooked is that demand, that increased demand for the available water in that area.

Are we, are we dealing with a challenge with the municipalities? Hi, I, I live in this area now. All of a sudden, my water.. I just..

I'm struggling. How do we deal with that? How does the infrastructure, the existing infrastructure that says this is our community, this is how we, you know, deal and treat with our water as a community? Then all of a sudden, here comes, you know, big demand, and now all of a sudden the infrastructure has problems, 09:03 right?

I think what's happening, and you'll see this in some places, some of these data centers are coming into these areas, and we have seen it with some of the newer ones that are being built in some of the more municipal areas, like Dallas, where companies coming in and saying I'm going to build this facility, and what they don't understand is that they have to treat the water within this data center in a certain way, and so we've actually walked into a few of these places that said, "Oh, I have to treat the water, and they don't understand that they have to treat the water by adding either corrosion and scale inhibitors and things of that nature, or blowing down this water to a certain level to keep concentrations at a minimum, and what they end up doing is actually fouling or scaling their equipment, and having to scrap that equipment at a very high cost, so they're not necessarily going back to municipality and saying give me more water, they're saying, oh, I'm going to run without adding any kind of chemistry to this water to a failure, and not realizing that.

The problem, I agree 10:02 with that 100% That's well, that's not good thinking, let's put it that way. From a business perspective, not good thinking. I agree with you 100% but, but, but in a municipality, I have a water treatment facility. It's, it's made of concrete, and it has pumps, and it has, you know, circulation.

It does what it's there, right there. You don't just expand it, you don't just take it. I mean, it is what it is. It's, it's, it's a static size, and as you continue to draw on that, because you have a greater demand in your community, I don't know how, and nobody, I guarantee nobody's come to me and said, "Hey, we're going to build another water treatment plant for this municipality, that's not those conversations are not happening, and it's the government, and it doesn't happen overnight, 10:48 right?

And where are they going to get the water to even source? Point, that's 10:51 the point. I don't understand. Jo Anna, help me understand.

10:55 There really is no, no easy answer to that. And I think the problem is we don't have a lot of water to supply. See, that's 11:01 the point. 11:03 Yeah, and see, this is 11:03 the conversation.

It's all great. I can, I can put a generator over here, I can do all the stuff that I need to do, and it's all fantastic, it's all wonderful. But, but there's that ripple effect, right? And you're the first person, yes, she's the first person that we were talking about, that demand for water, and then all of a sudden I'm just sort of pulling on that string, so, so I guess it's, how efficient can I use the existing water to be able to achieve my objectives, 11:33 right?

And that's exactly what we come in and do, right, reevaluate the whole system and say, what exactly can we do to reuse this water as much as possible, and we add the chemistry to help them do that, right? So that everything operates efficiently, that we don't fail the equipment, and that we don't shut them down, because the minute we shut down a power plant or any other people, they're not millions of dollars, right? So that's our objective. We walk in there, we take a look at the water, we take a look at the chemistry, you look at everything possibly we can do to stretch that that water as thinly as possible, so that we can get to the point of one running efficiently, but also giving them the performance.

Are 12:10 there are there any substitutes to water that are out there, chemical substitutes, or is this water though it's the go-to 12:18 water's the go-to one, it's most inexpensive, and two, it's the best for heat transfer, as far as you know what you've got. So, really, it's the best way to get around, but yes, there are things you can add to the water, like glycol for a cooling system to help it, you know, cool better, but you're not going to find a substitute at this point, so it's really the best thing that you can use for cooling or for heating, 12:41 yeah.

yeah, it's so funny. I always had that in many of the conversations we've had around it's, it's, it gets down to time, 12:53 right? 12:54 So I'm a, I'm a data center, or I'm an expanding business, or I'm whatever, and I need that additional capacity. I, I don't want to depend on the utility.

I'm blah blah blah, you know, it's the same story, but there's always that that lead time and the amount of the touch points that exist for that whatever strategy, right? And it's from my perspective, it's so risky because it all it takes is one little element, a little thing over here that we can't like transformers, don't get me going on transformer, I can't find a transformer, or if I have a transformer, it's it's it's way out there from the delivery, yeah, exactly, and so everything's shut down, 13:39 right, and the same thing with water, I mean, you can't just make a change and expect everything to be overnight, right?

It takes a while before things actually happen for you, so.. 13:48 but isn't it? Aren't we as an industry striving for something that's a little quicker, a little bit more efficient, a little bit like.. or is that just..

are we just bound by the physics of what we're doing? You know, 13:59 a lot of times, a lot of facilities will come to us and say, can you do something for us, and you know, exceed what we're doing now, and make a change, and ideally we would love to be able to do that, but the real reality is it takes time to really go through studies and everything else to look at how are we going to make things better for you. It's not an overnight success, right? It's not going to happen immediately.

There are things that we can try to do to make some changes. I'll give you an example. So, I presented a paper on Monday on a product that we have that's called Oxy Plus. It's an oxidizing bio site.

A lot of these power plants are using bleach or sodium hypochlorite as an oxidizer in their cooling systems, and because of it, they're limited on their cycles, what they can concentrate up the water, so how much water they can use, so they're not blowing down as much of that water. We came in with this product, Oxy Plus. It reduces that level of chlorides. Remember, I was talking about how much you concentrate your chlorides, and because of it, we were able to increase that concentration of the water even more and.

Reduce the amount of water they were discharging. Now this particular plant is a zero liquid discharge plant. What does that mean? We were sending less to that concentrator, less chloride or less salt to that concentrator meant less going out at the at the at the actual outfall, less going out to the landfill, and we saved them a ton of money, so it took a little bit of time to do that actual change in the study, probably about a couple of months, but we did save them some time and effort and money, so you got to do things like that, but it takes a little bit of time, it's not an overnight, that makes sense, 15:34 right?

15:35 How is your business being impacted by, are you seeing a change in the regulatory environment, 15:42 somewhat. Yeah, a lot of places. I mean, it depends on what the each individual facility, right there, they have their regulatory environmental people that are always going back and forth and making negotiations, if you will. But a lot of it is, it's coming back down to there are a lot of heavy metals that are being regulated now.

There are a lot of new permits that are being renegotiated and lower restrictions as far as what discharge is coming in, and I mean it's each individual facility, right? And each state, I think that's the pieces we're in 42 different states right now, and each individual state has its own regulations, and we're having to deal that on a case by case basis. So, yeah, I mean, it just depends on what it's a 16:22 dynamic environment. I don't, you know, kudos to you and others that can, you know, manage that, because there's just it.

And again, every time I go to, I broadcast from events, and I specifically, this one, I just think, well, what about that? What about this one? That's one of the first questions we asked. I don't know.

What are you gonna do? What are you gonna.. how you know, and it never ends. And it's..

it's phenomenal to know that things get done 16:50 right 16:50 somehow. It moves forward without being just, you know, process atrophy. I can't move forward. I don't know what to do, you know.

16:59 No, like I said, that's one of the first questions we ask when we go into a new facility, so 17:04 yeah. Well, it's exciting time. Yeah, it is. No doubt about it.

Okay. Jo Anna, how do people get a hold of you? 17:13 Look for me on LinkedIn, you'll find me there. 17:15 Ordonez.

17:16 Yes, sir. I'm 17:17 trying to learn Spanish, by the way. I'm lousy. 17:20 It's fun.

17:22 I wouldn't go that far. It's, it's, it's work for me, let's put it that way. 17:28 But I want to dock on it. You were absolutely wonderful.

17:32 Thank you. 17:33 I love this conversation, and you just made me, you just brought to my attention another pinch point that I have no answer for. 17:41 There you go. So, 17:42 I don't know what to do.

17:42 All right, 17:43 contact, contact Water Tech. How's that? Says that's what you do. You, if you're like me and I have no answers, you contact Water Tech.

17:50 Perfect. 17:51 Yeah, I highly recommend. We're gonna have all the contact information for Jo Anna out on industrial talk, so reach out to her, because you need to know more about your water. There is that, okay.

18:01 Thank you. 18:01 That's that's sales 101 Try to keep very, very easy. All right, we're broadcasting from Power Gym, San Antonio, Texas, is the location. They get great people like Jo Anna delivering some sage insights into what they do.

All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned, we will be right back. 18:21 You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network. 18:32 That's Jo Anna.

How about that for a conversation? We at PowerGen talk about PowerGen and the needs of power and all that good stuff, all wonderful, and the fact that these data centers are demanding more power, they need more power. I like the conversation around water. Yeah, yeah, cooling, we need water, we need it in a big way, if we want to venture into this brave new world of all these data centers and all of this power demand, right at the heart is water.

We need to keep it cool. They just don't function right, right there. Absolutely, Water Tech is the company, Jo Anna Adoniaz, I got it right in there. It is.

You need to reach out. All the contact information for Jo Anna out is out on industrial talk. Reach out, we need water. We need solutions for the water solutions.

Yeah, we need it. They're leading the way. Absolutely wonderful conversation. You need to put power gin on your, your, you know, next year to attend.

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All right, industrial talk. People be brave, dare greatly. You hang out with Jo Anna, and you know what? Yep, you will be changing the world.

We're gonna have another great conversation coming from Power Gin. So, always 21:00 stay tuned.