Bridging innovative water solutions and practical needs for water infrastructure upgrades
November 19, 2024
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Thanks to new water solutions and innovations, now is the time to upgrade or replace water infrastructure. But utilities still face some challenges.
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Across the globe, many water assets are getting old. It’s time to replace them. Fortunately, when it comes to upgrading assets in water infrastructure, we are in a golden age of innovation.
Come with me and look into the future. Can you envision potable water treatment facilities and water resource recovery facilities running themselves? Yes, you read that right: a few decades from now, I can see a world with fully autonomous water and wastewater treatment plants.
An informal analysis of patents for technologies related to physical, chemical, and biological treatment of water, wastewater, or sewage shows that more patents are being issued. In fact, there’s been a fourfold increase in the number of patents issued between 2010 and 2020. That is staggering. We think this trend will continue. And we know there will be plenty of new technologies that can help make utilities and water infrastructure more resilient for the future.
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The water industry is seeing more new technologies that can help with infrastructure upgrades.
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We will still rely on knowledgeable professionals to manage and maintain the devices required for bots to operate at peak performance.
For the foreseeable future, utility leaders face a tough challenge. They need to balance practical needs, ratepayer considerations, and regulatory challenges—all while trying to plan for the future of their water infrastructure with an eye toward innovation. They are trying to do more with less while juggling aging assets and an aging workforce.
So, how could we help utilities get from the challenges of today to the vision I see for the future?
I’m going to share three challenges water utilities face with aging water infrastructure. And I’ll also offer some ideas about how upgrading those assets with more innovation in the mix can help.
Challenge #1: Regulatory and cost pressures
The pressures from regulations and ongoing costs associated with running a water or wastewater system are not new. But there are an increasing number and complexity of unknowns about future regulatory changes and costs. And that makes it difficult for a utility when planning upgrades to water infrastructure.
From the EPA’s PFAS regulations guiding drinking water and biosolids management to anticipated air emissions guidelines, we’re seeing more stringent requirements. At the same time, systems need to find ways to reduce the costs of inputs like energy, chemicals, and staffing levels.
What’s next?
It’s hard to determine what to add or take away, because that affects future options, personnel, resources, and operations. Utility managers are challenged with where and how to make changes under these increasing pressures. We encourage our clients to weigh the trade-offs of employing new technologies for water infrastructure with their compliance needs.
This can be complex, and there are tools and solutions to help navigate this space. First are solutions related to decision-making. For many years now, our industry has relied on business case evaluations through triple bottom line or other techniques. The assumption of that decision-making was that the future can be reliably predicted from the past. This is clearly no longer true. We only need to consider the recurrence of 100-year storms in the last 25 years (Hurricanes Katrina in 2005, Sandy in 2012, and Harvey in 2017).
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An overview of the four parallel MABR tank trains at the Hespeler Wastewater Treatment Plant in Waterloo, Canada.
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Our decision-making models and framework need to change to account for this. We encourage our clients to consider stochastic decision-making solutions. Why? Because they make large-system decisions for complex challenges. Our team just unveiled a digital solution for our clients called DecisionLogix, which we hope they’ll use to streamline decision-making and reporting processes.
What other technologies are available? Integrated resource management models, digital shadows, and digital twins all help with decision-making. These can be paired with immersive 3D modeling to provide specific insights. Imagine, for example, a way to visualize a penstock operation over many years, integrating wear and tear.
There are so many exciting new developments in this area. There is plenty of innovation to help us achieve more upgraded, sustainable water infrastructure.
Challenge #2: The desire for sustainability in water infrastructure
Most utilities are working hard to move toward sustainable water infrastructure. But it’s hard not to ask, at what cost?
While the desire for sustainability and a reduced carbon footprint is strong, it may require large financial expenditures to hit high sustainability targets. Growing populations have a huge impact on the costs to be more sustainable. Location matters, too. Is there room to expand? Can the energy supply be greener? Is the utility serving rural customers or urban, or is it a growing exurb with limited access to natural resources?
The answers to these questions and the resulting outcomes trickle down to ratepayers. I recently spoke to a utility manager who told me, “Asked whether people support a sustainable utility, most people say yes. But how do we capture the price-willingness of customers to fund a sustainable future? When dollars are discussed, the conversation changes quickly.”
So, do we need to find out how much customers are willing to pay for sustainable versus status quo water infrastructure upgrades? Is it important?
" }This is the conundrum: We have a solution, but it comes at a cost. Utility leaders and technology mediators in our industry must actively and intentionally choose to be innovative.
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What’s next?
The truth is all upgraded water infrastructure will be more sustainable. A properly equipped facility that uses innovative tools is balanced. It will use the right technology to serve the utility and its ratepayers for the long term.
For example, technology allows us to do predictive equipment management. How so? By using novel micro-electro-mechanical systems sensors for equipment monitoring as part of asset upgrades. Now, imagine if we had this in all blowers, pumps, and other systems and water infrastructure. It would provide early warnings around asset health. That means they can operate efficiently and sustainably over longer periods of time.
This technology wasn’t readily accessible in the past. Now it is ubiquitous in other industries and quickly making its way into higher-end IoT-enabled equipment solutions. This is the conundrum: We have a solution, but it comes at a cost. Utility leaders and technology mediators in our industry must actively and intentionally choose to be innovative.
Challenge #3: Change management (and new technology)
This leads us to another big challenge for utility leaders: How can they convince their staff, ratepayers, and invested parties that it’s OK to change? How can they build a case for using new technology when there could be risk involved? This is especially true for newer technology that isn’t fully matured.
What’s next?
Careful assessment is crucial. This will help a utility determine which innovations could realistically work for them. For example, on the wastewater side there’s an innovation called membrane aerated biofilm reactors (MABR). This technology can reduce the energy cost of wastewater treatment and nutrient removal by as much as 60 percent.
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An engineer in a control room.
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Our team helped the Region of Waterloo upgrade the Hespeler Wastewater Treatment Plant in Waterloo, Ontario. We provided the Region with technical and financial analysis for retrofitting to MABR. We also designed current upgrades to allow for the expansion of the technology in the future to add more plant capacity.
The MABR process could potentially save tens of thousands of dollars per year in operating costs, while also using a smaller footprint. Those of us in innovation think it’s really promising, but it hasn’t been adopted widely. Fewer than a dozen plants have used it at scale in North America. So, utilities must decide the strategy that’s right for them, and whether they can right-size their water infrastructure to integrate this new technology into it.
It’s key that we focus on adoption of “the new” and the change management required to support it. But we can’t forget the importance of preserving critical, well-established skills sets and expertise within our community of practice. Take the critical value of practical experience and testing through dry runs, for example. This will help professionals continue to recognize problems, troubleshoot, learn, and fix issues when technology requires optimization or adjustment.
Here too, innovation can play a role. We are just now exploring virtual, extended, and augmented reality solutions for training and workforce development. This is going to be an exciting area in the coming decade.
The future of water and wastewater infrastructure
We have more technology available to us in the water industry today than ever before. It can unlock all kinds of potential from our water and wastewater infrastructure and systems. But the way we’re evaluating it doesn’t allow us to see the full value unless someone on the utility side is forward-thinking.
I have so much respect for utilities willing to take little risks in the direction of innovation. But I also know there are a lot of challenges with upgrading water infrastructure. For me, it’s easy to talk about innovation, but bringing it to life in the field is the hard part. I also see the need for critical innovation around funding models and integration of public-private partnerships and other methodologies to share and redistribute risk in the landscape.
It’s going to take time, investment, and energy from all sides of the industry to understand what this will look like. I’m confident that the future is full of golden opportunities. But, neither I nor others in our industry who pour their energy into shaping the future can tell you with certainty how it will play out.
Our ideas may at first seem silly and unachievable. But don’t mock us—at least not yet. Why? Because, and with humble thanks to American Futurologist Jim Dator, “Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.”
A version of this blog was published in Water Online and in Australian Water.
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