Providing clean and safe drinking water day in, day out isn’t as easy as it sounds. To get the tap water you really want – clean, safe, and drinkable – there’s an entire chain of drinking water and wastewater treatment processes behind. And that has its price. Complex plants and pipe networks need to be built, operated, and maintained to provide a reliable municipal water supply. And the high investment, operational, and lifecycle costs are the reason why every drop is valuable. Treated water that is lost within the system and can’t be billed – non-revenue water (NRW) – is therefore an economical issue for water utilities and has to be minimized as fast as possible. The clock is ticking. And not just because of the financial loss but also because of potential ecological and humanitarian reasons.
Aging pipe networks, difficult temperature conditions, vibration caused by construction work – there are many causes for leaks in water infrastructure. Unfortunately, leaks often appear beneath the surface where nobody can see them until it’s too late. Billions of drops, millions of cubic meters of drinking water are lost by many water utilities due to leaks every year. How can you minimize these losses? Not just to prevent the lost revenue, but also to conserve the vital resource, to keep drinking water clean, and to prevent buildings and infrastructure from dangerous undercutting. There’s a smart way for water utilities to ensure constant leakage detection with minimal effort. And we’re going to explore it.
We spent the final week of November at Frankfurt attending Enlit Europe 2022, a major European energy event following COP27 focused on stories of people, projects, and technologies driving the energy transition. From the various conversations, hub sessions and summit keynotes and panels we take a lot of learnings back with us. Here is a quick snapshot of our top takeaways.
Traditional electricity network management has been based on one single direction of the energy coming from large production units to the end-users. With the energy sector shifting from fossil-based to zero-carbon energy sources connected to medium- and low-voltage, grid operators come across completely new challenges. Moreover, with the electrification of transportation and heating sectors as well as the latest socioeconomic developments, energy demand and energy prices increase dramatically. In this new energy era commercial and industrial meters are called to serve a wider range of applications than energy billing.
Every year, millions of households wait for the manual readings of their water meters, having to stay home or organize friends or neighbors to be present so that the reading can take place. Additionally, for water utilities the annual reading is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and causes high expenses. In the 21st century, with everything going digital or even virtual - from planning and simulation to diagnostics, from offerings-as-a-service to digital twins, and from small IIoT components to AGVs, robotics, and e-mobility, the measurement of water is still largely done in an analogue manner. Why not use the benefits of digitalization to make readings easier, more comfortable, more reliable, and more efficient for all parties involved?
Colorless, odorless, indispensable for life. Arguably the most important, resource on the planet, water is under constant threat from climate change and leaky infrastructure. Ironically, while sea levels are rising on one hand, water shortages are becoming increasingly common on the other.
