In an Expert Focus article for WaterBriefing, HP Nanda, CEO at Grundfos Water Utility, discusses whether better water management help solve climate challenges in our lifetime.

HP Nanda: Can better water management help solve climate challenges in our lifetime?

Yes, it can. Water challenges are climate challenges, as demonstrated by the recent floods in Vermont, Beijing, and northern India, which coincided with temperatures in other parts of the world reaching record highs – Sicily, for instance, hit highs of 48.8 degrees Celsius.

We must solve these challenges in our lifetime for our future generations to thrive. Solving the world’s water and climate challenges will require a data-driven solution that can address the triple threat of key issues facing water systems worldwide.

First, although governments and businesses globally understand the importance of managing water resources sustainably, we need new and innovative ways of problem solving with suitable technologies to achieve this goal. Second, collecting, transporting, and recycling wastewater requires a large amount of energy that is increasingly difficult to afford and undesirable for carbon neutrality. Third, worsening labour shortages in the industry will intensify the need to make processes as automated and efficient as possible.

Overcoming all these challenges will be difficult, but not impossible. In fact, the industry’s continued investment in technological innovations means there has never been more cause for optimism.

Tech for all

Advancement in existing and new technologies must deliver increasing value to customers and end users. Technology can be global; solutions must be local. Piloting new solutions, scaling them up, and transferring the knowledge across borders to make them available to all are therefore vital steps to be taken by the industry as a whole.

To play our part in solving world’s water and climate challenges, we at Grundfos are relentless in advancing our existing solutions as well as creating and even acquiring new ones. Against this backdrop, Grundfos recently acquired Metasphere, a UK-based company whose data-driven solutions may illuminate the way forward for preventing sewer overflows.

Metasphere has already proven the efficacy of its analytics-enabled approach in countries such as Australia, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and of course, on home turf with the leading water utilities of the UK. Grundfos has acquired Metasphere with the aim of making its innovative solution available to our global network of customers in 100+ countries. This network spans countries from Cambodia to Uganda to the USA, each of which face their own water-related challenges but all of which must be part of the conversation if we are to safeguard the future of the world’s most precious resource.

Energy efficiency

It is one thing for countries to commit to the treatment, distribution, and recycling of wastewater. It is quite another, in the current economic climate, to be able to afford the energy that these processes require. Recycling wastewater is one of very few means by which we can solve the issue of water scarcity in our lifetime, so we must ensure that the industry can meet these energy needs.

Energy efficiency is an issue that deserves greater attention in general, but it is particularly important in the context of water management. The need to move water is a fact of life; Mother Nature doesn’t always provide this resource in the places where it’s needed most. Our goal as an industry should therefore be to move this water in the most efficient way possible – not an easy task.

Fortunately, we don’t have to work all this out by ourselves. Smart sewer technology, for instance, can help identify the optimal way of moving water around a network thanks to its delivery of environmental data in real time. Harnessing the power of data to make the movement of water as efficient as possible will be key to handling water at the right place, at the right time, in the right quantities.

Automation to help, not hinder, human professionals

Let’s leave the “humans versus machines” narrative to science fiction, shall we? In the short term at least, data-driven solutions will make the jobs of people working in the industry easier, not obsolete.

Automation has a range of benefits for human water professionals, many of which are encapsulated in the solutions provided by Metasphere. Working with utility companies to understand the problems they face, Metasphere can design solutions in collaboration with these organisations, helping water professional predict and then prevent the incidents in a timely manner.

Metasphere’s wastewater telemetry units are often installed in manholes that are aggressive environments for technology to be deployed. Despite this, they can be installed in as little as five to 30 minutes and are specifically designed to withstand their difficult environments, providing a robust and reliable stream of real-time information to the cloud. Combined with local weather forecasts and industry-leading algorithm-based predictive software, this helps customers precisely identify the pressure points most in need of attention. As a result, the flow of people working with water, as well as the flow of water itself, is more efficient than ever.

Indeed, automated water systems are making people’s lives easier in rural as well as urban settings. Grundfos Solar Connect, for instance, collects real-time data on the performance of solar-powered water pumps and sends it straight to the user’s smartphone.

Since its rollout in Australia, Solar Connect has made life easier for the agricultural workers who now only need to visit pump sites in case of performance issues – which, by the way, are identified by the technology in real time. With this solution due to be rolled out in the USA soon, there will be even more opportunities for people to benefit from tech’s ability to bridge the geographical distances between people and their pumps.

If we are going to solve the world’s water-related issues, we will need both artificial intelligence and real expertise. Technology can help the industry cope with its global labour shortage, but humans still have a crucial role to play. Working together, both sides can bring the best out of each other.

Solving a tripartite problem

There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to issues as complex as water management. The world is far too vast and diverse a place for that.

Our job as an industry is therefore to identify the most innovative solutions and see how these can be tailored to overcome the specific challenges that different parts of the world face. This is no mean feat, but disentangling the three interconnected issues confronting the world’s water supply was never going to be easy.

Nevertheless, we can rise to all these challenges by continuing to invest in solutions that make data work as hard as the industry’s people have done to make the world a better, more sustainable, and more equitable place.