Smart water solutions play an important role in efficient water deliveries and waste reduction, which are demanded more and more by water operators. Today’s Internet of Things technologies and the data devices generate have made water management smarter than ever.
Smart water solutions play an important role in efficient water deliveries and waste reduction, which are demanded more and more by water operators. Today’s Internet of Things technologies and the data devices generate have made water management smarter than ever.
Smart water management has become a huge market, with MarketsandMarkets expecting compound annual growth rate of 18.9 percent from now to 2021. While the market potential huge, Lukas Loeffler, President of Water and Wastewater Segment at
Schneider Electric, said using IoT and data to manage water effectively isn’t exactly a new idea. “This trend has been around in the water industry for some time and is becoming more common, driven by the need of utilities to improve their performance, save costs, and maximize their asset life. Specifically, larger cities or regional/national players with more than one plant to manage have embarked on this journey for a while,” he said.
Still, leveraging the power of data benefits operators in many ways as compared to before the advent of IoT and big data, Loeffler said. “Many water utilities had deployed systems from different vendors or had very specific needs for certain hardware/software-based solutions to address certain aspects of the operation only. Between water/wastewater operations, network management, maintenance, customer complaints or billing, there were different departments with no/little connectivity and most of the time no overarching IT strategy. Only after having access to data from many different areas in the operation did they realize the need to interconnect the data and separate subsystems to look at the greater whole, such as at the enterprise level,” he said.
Schneider Electric has a solution in this regard, called Water Network Optimization (WNO), which is an operation system that expands a water distribution network’s SCADA capabilities. According to Loeffler, It forecasts the behavior of the distribution network and anticipates the impact of planned and unplanned events before they happen. “By using real-time data, WNO takes into consideration the everchanging condition of the network, so an operator’s actions are always based on the most updated situation,” he said. “In doing this, the solution enables water distribution network operators and managers to make better and smarter decisions faster, reduce the risk and cost of operation and maintenance activities.”
The solution was deployed in Kalundborg Forsyning, which supplies domestic tap water and district heating as well as sewer system maintenance in Kalundborg, Denmark. Prior to deployment, operators had a limited overview of the water distribution network and were less likely to make the best possible decision when emergencies arose. To run WNO, the water network is divided into sections, each with section wells that provide flow and pressure measurements. WNO then allows operators to compare the expected water consumption with the actual amount of water flowing into the section. As the model runs based on real-time data, it offers a larger variety of solutions than traditional network models since it is possible to run calculations based on current situations rather than on static average daily consumption. The solution resulted in increased overview and insight, enabled operators to adjust scenarios to visualize the consequences of different planning strategies, and allowed them to make faster and more efficient responses to water pollution-related emergencies.
As for the future, Loeffler expects more and more water utilities to adopt smart solutions. “Utilities satisfy their basic service compliance and move up the ladder to become more economically and customer focused. In the municipal space, investment budgets continue to be under pressure and many utilities have to rebuild their infrastructure from savings on their operational cost side. Only by better managing their efficiency (energy, process and assets) will they be able to generate the savings to reinvest,” he said.