Inefficiencies
are flooding the global water infrastructure. Nearly 20% of water is lost in
developed countries through leaks, theft or mismanagement. This percentage,
also known as non-water revenues, can rise to 40-50% in developing countries.
Overall, this represents nearly $14bn per year globally in lost revenues
according to the World Bank. In a context of increasing water demand (+55% by
2050) and growing population (9.6bn by 2050), finding ways to reduce these
losses and increase efficiencies in the system is growing evermore crucial.
Developments on the hardware and software sides are offering new possibilities.
At the hardware level, technology can now track flows much more precisely.
Ultrasound meters, for example, measure flows without using mechanical parts,
thus reducing maintenance costs. They also detect smaller variations in flows
and, therefore, smaller leaks. Using information and communication
technologies, smart meters can communicate with each other to optimise water
flows and signal when maintenance is needed. This can be particularly useful in
remote rural areas of developing countries where residents often depend on a
single water pump.
On the software side, reductions in the cost of computing (notably via the
cloud) have allowed utilities to make sense of an ever-increasing amount of
data. This is creating a new market for service providers like TaKaDu, an
Israeli start-up that leverages big-data analytics to optimise systems and
track anomalies in water usage.
In the most basic applications, the data used
for the analysis comes from the water infrastructure itself. This data can also
be combined with information from outside the system. A public-private
partnership entered into by the Dutch Ministry of Water uses information from
diverse sources (e.g. levee pressure, water level and weather data) to improve
disaster planning and risk management of floods, for example. The predictive
ability provided by data analytics also offers opportunities to optimise water
consumption in the agricultural sector, which alone accounts for 70% of total
global water withdrawals. Solar-powered monitors can now track and transmit
information about local weather conditions (actual and forecast), soil moisture
levels and crop types via the Internet. This allows farmers in developed
countries—or those in developing countries who own and control their water
supply—to budget, optimise and control their water use remotely.
Better monitoring could also help utilities more easily recoup their costs. On
the “carrot” side, sharing information about quality and consumption in a more
effective and transparent manner with customers helps build trust about the
reliability of the service, thereby increasing customers’ willingness to pay.
On the “stick” side, meters that can be shut down in case of non-payment and
instantly reactivated once payment is received have been shown to help increase
collection rates in urban areas. The role of big data in water management will
also benefit from developments of big data in other sectors. Where people
pay for water using their mobile phones, the data about water payments could be
used to infer the status of a particular water point – an absence of
payments over a long period could indicate a problem with the pump, for
example. These synergies, which will increase as the use of remote sensing and
big data analytics spreads, point to some of the changes the Industrial
Internet could bring about. The big data revolution will not close the global
infrastructure financing gap; estimated at $1trn a year, the latter is simply
too large. But the gains in efficiencies and increased understanding of the system
it provides could help reduce it. Originally published September 6, 2013.
Revised in March 2015 to reflect latest figures and developments.
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