The forecast is for droughts and heavy rain, and water shortages.
- There will be continuing water crises whose cause will be more extreme weather. If we’re unlucky, there will be another Day Zero for a major urban area. Advanced pressure management will again show itself to be the most cost-effective solution in a crisis.
- Networks will be increasingly instrumented – measuring pressures and flows, and acoustic monitoring – and pervasive IoT/LTE-M will cement a leadership position over islands of LPWAN technologies on unlicensed spectrum.
- The US will continue to focus on water quality at the expense of water loss.
- There will be no digital revolution. The water sector will continue to be slow to change. It is not subject to competitive market pressures, and even where targets are set, for example by regulators, they are not very challenging to achieve. That doesn’t mean that the water sector isn’t changing, but progress will be relatively slow and companies will fail slow rather than fast. Even where technologies are adopted, progress will be held back by a failure to change how people are organised, what they do and how they do it.
- Water will remain something of a Cinderella in the climate change domain but it will steadily gain recognition. Its wide impact, Will Sarni says, has economic, business, social and spiritual dimensions, and this will become increasingly apparent.
- More will be done with data, but progress will be slowed by overly ambitious data centralisation projects.
Want to change the future rather than resign yourself to it? Then try these:
- Set more stretching targets for reductions in real losses
- Instrument your network at a density of 10 measuring devices per DMA/1,000 homes
- Put someone in charge of pressure in the network with responsibility to deliver minimum viable pressures without transients, alongside the person you likely already have in charge of leakage, and get them to work together to deliver burst/leakage reduction targets
- Adopt an industry-specific data analytics/insight solution with the aim to free up analysts’ time for higher value tasks or reduce their number
i2O is proactively working with its clients towards a better future.
A Happy New Year to all readers.