The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is looking to the future. The water utility today drops a 75-page, 100-point report on its aims for the next three years. And it is ambitious! We aren't just talking about things like paperless billing, new water rate structures and getting everyone automated meters. We're talking about big picture ideas like harvesting the tons of wastewater we produce daily into clean energy sources, covering water treatment plants in solar energy panels and selling insurance (a "service line protection plan" in their words).

Some of the energy initiatives (like the one to use methane from Newtown Creek to power homes) are already in the works while others (like a wind turbine at the Oakwood Beach Wastewater Treatment Plant) are a bit further off. But surprisingly, most of them seem quite doable rather than being pipe dreams. “There’s nothing in here that’s pie in the sky,” Caswell F. Holloway, the city’s commissioner of environmental protection, said of the plan to the Times. “While we’re early in the process, it’s real.”

One of the ideas that really caught our attention? The DEP is mulling the idea of selling insurance, which is certainly an interesting way to raise some revenue. We'll let them explain:

A significant majority of water infrastructure leaks that DEP responds to involve private service lines that connect customer properties to the distribution system. Property owners are responsible for service line repairs, which must be completed by a qualified contractor. As a result, customers are often forced to pay thousands of dollars to repair a damaged service line, or risk termination of service. To reduce this risk, DEP will explore offering customers a service line protection plan in which participating customers would pay a small monthly premium in exchange for guaranteed repair of a service line break. A protection plan would spare homeowners the high costs of unexpected service line repairs, and would free up DEP resources to repair, maintain, and improve the water and sewer network.

Also in the DEP's future are a slew of day-to-day things that we are more than happy to applaud, like building out and replacing critical water mains, protecting our watershed, making capital projects more transparent to the public and upgrading sewer networks where needed. Really though, as long as our water continues to be safe and taste good we'd probably be happy.