Eoin Lane, IBM Smarter Water Architect

By Eoin Lane

People often say that water is the new oil, but really, it’s not. Oil is a fossil fuel that takes millions of years and a lot of pressure to create. When we burn oil – for example, by driving our cars – it is gone forever (or at least for a few more millions of years before it can be created again!).

Water, on the other hand, cannot be created or destroyed (this is not strictly true, but bear with me). The same amount of water is around today that was around when the Earth was formed. The truth is there is a lot of water on Earth – just not a lot of drinking water.

Here are some facts about just how little drinkable water is available:

* 97.5 percent of all water on Earth is salt water, leaving only 2.5 percent as fresh water
* Of that fresh water, nearly 70 percent is locked in ice
* Most of the rest of that freshwater is in aquifers which we are draining much more quickly than the natural recharge rate
* Two-thirds of our freshwater is used to grow food
* With 83 million more people on Earth each year, water demand will keep going up unless we change how we use it.[1]

Margaret Catley-Carlson of the Global Water Partnership has said, ”We cannot create water, but we can manage it better, much better.” [2] Take, for example, the longest water tunnel supplying NYC: it is 85 miles long, and it leaks 35 million gallons of water every day. We need to become much smarter about how we manage this precious resource and about how we collect, analyze and use water data.

There are three ways we can become smarter about water management:  Instrumentation, Big Data analytics, and cooperation.

Instrumentation involves smart meters and sensors that take digital readings (pressure, flow etc.) and stores them in a database. The combination of smart meter data and GPS location data allows for rich visualization of the information. On top of this we can also display water pipe information, asset information (such as manholes, pumps, and work orders), as well as customer information. We can be smart about this and organize all of the information using a semantic model. For now, think of a semantic model as a flexible model that allows us to connect information from different sources, for example, one that allows the water utility operator to determine what pipes are associated with which customers.

Big Data analytics can then be applied to the data collected through instrumentation. We can classify analytics into three broad categories:

•  Descriptive analytics (finding patterns in things that happened in the past)
•  Prescriptive or optimization analytics (the math of making things better in the present)
•  Predictive analytics (foretelling the future)

Let’s look at concrete examples of these, as applied to an instrumented water system.

To understand the power of descriptive analytics, watch the movie Moneyball. Moneyball tells the story of a poor baseball team that takes a sophisticated descriptive analytics approach and wins 20 consecutive games. The same kind of descriptive analytics can be applied to water assets such as pipes, pumps, etc. Descriptive analytics could allow a water utility to pinpoint leaky water pipes down to a particular type of pipe that’s manufactured by a local company.

For prescriptive or optimization analytics, let’s travel to Europe. I come from a town in southern Ireland called Cork, and a couple of years ago I was walking home when I met some water utility workers making holes in the road. After chatting with them, I learned that the holes in the road were for acoustic sensors, which use sound to locate leaks. I also found out that the pipe networks were very old, and nobody knew where the pipes really were. But they did know they were leaking very badly. This story is echoed across many European cities and towns, and indeed, around the world.

One of the major contributing factors to these leaks is the water pressure in the pipes, which is kept high to ensure good pressure on the tap side. However, analytics can help here. We can run optimization analytics on the pressure reading data across the network to optimize the pressure in the network. This optimization will still maintain good pressure on the tap side, but bring down the overall pressure in the water network. Long term, this will reduce wear and tear on the pipes, and as a consequence reduce the leaks.

Lastly, predictive analytics can provide water utilities with information about when leaks or failures (pumps, pipes, sensors, meters, etc.) are likely to occur.

The theme of World Water Day 2013 is the International Year of Water Cooperation. Instrumentation and Big Data analytics are truly the foundation for cooperation about water management. Getting back to our Moneyball analogy, analytics enabled the Oakland A’s to build a better baseball team, for less money, but team players still had to cooperate and play as a team in order to win. Citizens and corporations, alike, must also cooperate when it comes to smarter water management.

In some communities such as Dubuque, Iowa, citizens use online water conservation portals to gain a better understanding of their water usage. They can also compare their water use with other similar local households. Here we are seeing cooperation between the citizens and the water utility company. Citizens can also collaborate by becoming the collective “eyes” of the water utility. This allows for authorities to get up-to-the-minute information on the state of the water infrastructure and prioritize fixing these problems. Check out the WaterWatcher initiative in South Africa.

I believe we can manage our water better by making our water networks smarter and by encouraging cooperation.

I’ll be on a live Facebook chat today, to discuss how technology can help conserve water. Please join me.

But before I go, I will leave you with a few more sobering facts about how we currently use water:

Americans use about 100 gallons of water at home every day * Millions of the world’s poorest subsist on fewer than five gallons per day * 46 percent of the people on Earth do not have water piped to their homes * Women in developing countries walk an average of 3.7 miles daily to get water * In 15 years 1.8 billon people (a third of the world’s current population) will live in regions of severe water scarcity [1]

_______________________________________________________________

1. National Geographic – Water Our Thirsty World

2. The Atlas of Water – Maggie Black et al.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, IBM Smarter Planet, smarter analytics, smarter utilities, Smarter Water, smarter water management, utilities, water management

Ahmed Simjee, Smarter Planet Leader, IBM South Africa

By Ahmed Simjee

When I was growing up in South Africa, my family was fortunate.  We had access to fresh drinking water. At first we lived on a small farm near Johannesburg, where we used a well. Later, when I moved closer to the city, I had good tap water. But many of my fellow South Africans weren’t so lucky, and, even today, many people in the rural areas and in informal settlements near the cities don’t have ready access to fresh drinking water. That’s why I’m extremely pleased to be spearheading an initiative in South Africa, WaterWatchers, which is aimed at using mobile phones and crowdsourcing to cut down on leaks and wasted water.

We’re launching our free WaterWatchers app today in Gauteng Province, home of Johannesburg and the capital city, Tshwane. With 12.3 million residents, the province represents 23% of South Africa’s population. We timed the launch to coincide with the United Nations’ World Water Day. If you’re in South Africa, please download the app.

We hope that once government leaders elsewhere in South Africa see WaterWatchers at work in Gauteng Province, they will adopt the service as well. South Africa is the only country in the world to include access to fresh water as a basic human right in its constitution, and the government has set a goal of extending that benefit to every citizen by 2020. Our WaterWatchers program will help South Africa achieve universal access to fresh water. Using SMS, the app enables citizens to quickly and conveniently report leaks and unauthorized use of water.

Communal tap in Johannesburg Credit: E. Muench

South Africa suffers from a critical water problem. It’s one of the driest places on earth, with average annual rainfall of just 45.7 cm, half the global number. South Africa ranks 148 out of 180 countries for water availability per capita, according to the United Nations World Water Development Report 2012. At the same time, in South African municipalities, an average of 37% of the water pushed through public water systems is lost via leaks or pilferage. In Tshwane alone, these losses cost the municipality about $50 million a year. South Africa’s draft National Water Resource Strategy estimates that it will cost about $100 billion to upgrade and expand the country’s water infrastructure over the next decade. So any savings from reducing waste and pilferage can be reinvested in system upgrades.

WaterWatchers takes advantage of the rapid spread of mobile phones in South Africa, where just about every adult now owns a hand set. Using the application, people take photos and answer three simple questions about water problems they observe. Then they SMS the information to a central database. All of the messages are stored and analyzed to help municipal authorities spot problems, dispatch repair crews and set maintenance  priorities. Using analytics technologies, officials will be able to predict where and when problems are likely to occur and plan pro-active maintenance.

Citizens with Internet access can also tap into a WaterWatchers portal. There, they can learn about water conservation and view a leak hotspot map showing where problems exist in their municipal water systems.

IBM  began exploring the idea of using crowdsourcing to address water issues in San Jose, Calif., with its CreekWatch mobile app. The simple application enables people with Apple iPhones to take photos of reservoirs and creeks they pass to report water levels and potential pollution problems. CreekWatch is now being used in 25 countries. The WaterWatchers app, built by IBM business partner Element Blue LLC, has additional capabilities, including the ability to post photos on Twitter and social networking Web sites. It’s available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry devices.

Once municipalities get the benefits of WaterWatchers, I hope it will be an eye-opener to the potential for using other cutting-edge technologies to make cities work better–for everything from transportation and energy to healthcare and education. In fact, the crowdsourcing technology in WaterWatchers could be used to help address a wide range of problems, including traffic jams, crime and pollution.

It all starts with awareness of the possibilities. WaterWatch engages citizens and government leaders alike. Once people understand problems and feel empowered to address them, society can make progress. I look forward to the day when all of my fellow South Africans enjoy easy access to fresh water.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Johannesburg, South Africa, Tshwane

Scott T. Rickards, CEO, Waterfund

By Scott T. Rickards

In our data-rich financial universe, a fundamental economic question remains unanswered: at what cost is it economical for the world’s largest cities to bring additional water supply online?  

The oil industry will tell you that $100/barrel oil is the value below which capital allocation can earn a return. Given its critical importance in our lives, why does the water industry not have a similar fast answer to the question? Is the ‘global water crisis’ a resource crisis or perhaps a capital crisis?

Precisely because of its critical importance, the water industry has been given a pass on cost transparency by everyone from politicians, to Wall Street, to economists due to the unimaginable consequences of not having an abundant supply of fresh water. As a result, the subject of water production costs remains largely unexplored and water has taken a back seat to virtually every other resource in the battle for private investment dollars.  

The large scale and non-uniformity of water financial data is also a major challenge to creating a precise water finance benchmark; no two water enterprises publish comparable financial statements. Water volumes, interest expense, energy costs, and capital expenditures must first be extracted from unstructured data sets often thousands of pages in length. Then, hidden costs and subsidies must be interpolated and modeled alongside the available information. Complex data challenges such as these are the main barriers to a successful and precise global water cost index.  

To be clear, the subject of water scarcity has not been ignored. Indeed, there are a number of benchmarks and even exchanges which value the scarcity of physical supply. Chile has an electronic water exchange as does Australia and several other important water-short regions. Others have attempted indices which measure the scarcity value of physical water supply.

What’s missing in these marketplaces and valuation metrics is an accounting of the massive capital spending required between the raw resource and the production of ‘finished water’ at your tap.  Ugandais endowed with widespread and plentiful natural water resources, yet 93 percent of the country does not have access to piped water in their home. Facts such as this lead one to believe that the ‘global water crisis’ is in fact, to a significant degree, an investment crisis – and a grand challenge in Big Data.

To that end, the Water Cost Index being developed by IBM and Waterfund seeks to shed light on exactly what it costs the world’s major cities to produce a unit of ‘finished water’ by applying IBM’s Big Data expertise to the volumes of unstructured information about water that exists today. Accounting for big-ticket items such as capital expenditures, debt service, and energy costs, how much does it really cost for Los Angeles, Jakarta, Singapore, Dubai and other cities to deliver water to homes?

Once complete, the index can be used to ring-fence and manage risk exposure to major water infrastructure projects. To take one specific example, the Jordan Red Sea Project seeks to intake and desalinate water at the Red Sea and deliver it via pipeline to severely water-stressed Amman, Jordan and the Dead Sea. The geopolitical upside of a successful outcome to this project is obvious, but total project costs run upwards of $25 billion dollars. Billions have already been pledged by major governments and the World Bank has recently given its seal of approval.

However, private investment will certainly be required. If the index could be used to create insurance to underwrite the investment exposures of private financiers in situations such as the dire one faced in Jordan, so enabling the investment to take place, it would be a valuable tool in changing how business gets done in the water industry and in extending and revamping the world’s water infrastructures.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, investment, smarter analytics, Smarter Water

Mary Keeling, Manager, Center for Economic Analysis, IBM Institute for Business Value

Water is one of our most essential resources – yet much of the water we use every day is “hidden” as an indirect, yet critical, component of something else – food, health, energy, transportation and more. And of all the water on Earth, only 1 percent of it is useable by ecosystems and humans. In other words, a little bit of water needs to go a long way.

 

As the world’s population increases from today’s 7 billion to an estimated 8 billion in 2025, the demand for water will rise to satisfy increased demand for food, particularly as meat consumption in global diets increase. Every time you consume a kilo of beef you many not realize that it takes 15,500 liters of water to produce it. For comparison, it takes 1,300 liters of water to produce a kilo of wheat.

Now consider the link between water and our health – access to safe drinking water is essential for health and this link is significant – more than 50 percent of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by people suffering from water-related illnesses. Water is also essential for producing a host of goods and services right across the economy.

When we break it down, each of us on average consumes about 3,800 liters of water a day embodied in the goods and services we produce, as well as the water we directly drink. And, we know that as the world’s population and incomes grow, so too will demand for the water to produce the goods and services needed to satisfy consumption.

Energy, in particular, is heavily reliant on water – it accounts for almost half of the total water used in the U.S. and 44 percent in the European Union.

A less obvious, but important water link wends through our transport networks. Road and rail systems are becoming increasingly vulnerable to flooding from storm surges, rainstorms and rising water tables. In addition, transport infrastructure along coastal regions is at increasing risk from rising sea-levels while at the other end of the spectrum, drought is pushing roads to their design limits and causing severe cracking, as well as restricting navigation channels.

Because of the inter-linkages of many of these water-related systems, problems in one are can quickly spill into other areas, creating widespread problems.

For example, we have more people living in water-stressed areas than ever before, where available supplies cannot meet demand. This issue is expected to intensify as the population in such areas rises by almost 40 percent from 2.8 to 3.9 billion between 2005 and 2030, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

We are also facing more intense and frequent floods around the globe that are resulting in significant human and financial costs. Such flooding impacts water quality as surface contaminants enter water supplies, aquifers and storm water runoffs. As a result, it is estimated that 780 million people currently do not have access to safe water. That figure is expected to rise to 2 billion by 2025.

All of these challenges and problems in the water system are compounded by the looming skills crisis in the water industry as large numbers of older workers retire and the industry struggles to attract and retain younger workers. 

However, amid all these challenges there is some good news. The technology exists to take a more intelligent approach to the way we manage water, using information and analytics to deliver improved outcomes right across the water management lifecycle. Many forward-looking utilities and businesses are already using technology to improve their water management practices – from Dubuque, Iowa, and Sonoma County, California, to Galway Bay inIreland, and many other areas around the world.

We need to encourage more great work and build momentum. The time to act for a collaborative, smarter approach to water management to address the challenges facing the world’s water systems, is now.

Join me for a Twitter chat today at 11:0am ET to discuss the importance of Smarter Water management.  Hashtag: #P4SPchat

Technorati Tags: Analytics, IBM, Smarter Planet, Smarter Water, water management, water safety

By Harry Kolar,  IBM Distinguished Engineer and Sensor-Based Solutions

The rough seas off the coast of Ireland, where the North Atlantic can churn waves more than 15 meters high, are home to some of the largest concentrations of wave energy in the world. This turbulent seascape has for centuries served as both a sanctuary for marine life and a source of commerce and sustenance for the people of Ireland and Europe.

Now the waters of Galway Bay are providing something new: information.

After more than 18 months of design, development and research, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) in association with IBM and the Marine Institute of Ireland last month turned on a massive data collection system that will capture and analyze – in real-time – the under water noise levels of the bay.

Initially, the system will capture and analyze the ambient noise of the ocean to establish a baseline of acoustics including natural and anthropogenic (man-made) sound sources including vessel traffic. But the ultimate goal is to capture and analyze the sounds and vibrations of hulking wave energy conversion machines that have begun bobbing along off the coast and help determine what, if any impact the sound waves from those devices could have on marine life – but especially highly sensitive dolphin, porpoise, and whale populations.

This year-long project is an offshoot of an effort launched in 2009 in Galway Bay by IBM and SEAI, called SmartBay. While much has been written about both of these projects, little has been said about the technology behind them. The “smarts,” if you will, of the SmartBay.

To pull off this latest project, IBM situated a large monitoring buoy just under 2 km from the southern shore of Galway Bay and outfitted it with two underwater sensors: a hydrophone and a particle velocity sensor. These sensors capture the underwater sound waves and transmit them wirelessly at about 15M bps via TCP/IP continuously – day and night – to a receiving system on the shore. That system has a dedicated high speed connection to an IBM data center in Dublin where a grid of four IBM System x3650 M2 servers processes the incoming data. As the information is analyzed it is stored on more than 36TB of storage between an IBM System Storage N3400 with 12 1TB drives, and IBM System Storage EXN3000 SAS/SATA Expansion system with 24 1TB drives.

IBM is in the process of developing software that will enable the existing systems to support and manage data coming in from an array of additional sensors, which will dramatically increase the scope of the test site. (The existing hydrophone can pick up acoustics from miles away.)

That’s smarter computing – applying the most strategic and efficient technology to achieve clearly defined business goals. In this case: determining the impact of wave energy machines on marine life.

But it’s also a terrific example of how IBM and partners are on the point for building the Smarter Planet. For example, the methods we’re applying in Galway Bay are piquing the interest of water stewards around the globe, many of whom are facing mounting interest from alternative energy companies looking to deploy wave energy conversion systems. It’s also attracting attention from offshore oil and gas industry leaders, who are working to monitor and minimize the environmental impact of their operations. Even companies involved in land-locked fossil fuel exploration projects are interested in the Galway Bay work.

The growing interest is a testament to an aspiration and a willingness to apply the right technologies, strategically, to achieve goals and solve problems. It’s what the Smarter Planet is all about.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: galway bay, IBM, ireland

Cahill

Across North America, drought-stricken farmers are facing historically small harvests, raising concerns about global shortages and increasing food prices. This summer’s drought should be a strong reminder that we have to manage our water resources more carefully.

In many countries, the competition for water between the countryside and cities is intensifying.  Farmers  face an uphill battle in the competition for water since industry can afford to pay much more than they can, according to the Earth Policy Institute.

This battle over water is likely to intensify. As the world’s levels of CO2 emissions continue to rise, the frequency of extreme weather phenomena such as heat waves is expected to intensify. Heat waves are expected to further strain the world’s water resources, especially in areas where water demand is increasing and water supplies are shrinking. The challenge worldwide is to meet today’s water needs while putting in place innovative strategies to address future requirements.

One of the best ways to promote sustainability is to make consumers aware of the true cost of water.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What we pay to the water company each month only reflects the price to bring clean water to our taps. It does not reflect the value of the resource in each of its various uses. Water management, resource expansion, environmental protection and infrastructure maintenance are expensive, and much of the cost is redistributed through state and federal taxes, as well as local and regional bond measures, according to the American Water Resources Association.

Transparency about the real cost of water should be a fundamental principle, irrespective of the source of funds that underwrite the supply.

Sullivan

For example, as a nation, we must begin to treat water as we would any other scarce resource and learn to live within our means. This requires efficiency and planning for sustainable use in the face of increasing demands for water, particularly in agriculture, industry and power production. Concern over the intensive use of groundwater, deterioration of surface waters, and various state and federal nutrient and water management regulations, are making us reexamine the efficiency of water and nutrient management strategies.

A study by University of California at Davis scientists shows that plants only use half the nitrogen fertilizer that farmers apply. The other half travels down through the soil, eventually making its way into local drinking water supplies where nitrate contamination can make the water unfit for drinking.

It’s a serious problem that’s getting worse.

Research shows that coupling the use of soil moisture measurement technology with irrigation controls can reduce water application and nutrient runoff by 50 percent – and those efficiencies also mean reduced energy use because less water is pumped overall.

Furthermore, increasing drought and aridity around the world, linked to climate change and land degradation, are becoming a major threat to food security and poverty reduction efforts, according to the United Nations.  Since 1950, 1.9 billion hectares (4.7 billion acres) of land around the world has become degraded, a problem that has reduced harvests, contributed to changing rainfall patterns and increased the vulnerability of millions of people. Each year, on average, another 12 million hectares (30 million acres) of land a year is lost to the problem.

Applying analytic insight can assess drought conditions, communicate threats and trigger actions in a systematic and efficient manner as drought conditions intensify. Although progress is being made, much more work is required to develop effective systems across the globe and to provide information at a scale that is meaningful for drought planning at the local level by water managers and other decision makers.

Extreme events – such as the extreme floods and droughts around the world in recent years – often provide stimulus for action. They provide the opening for change to take place.

Technorati Tags: IBM, UgMo

One of their biggest headaches is infrastructure–their roads, bridges, sidewalks, water lines and sewer pipes. They used to fix things when they broke. These days, increasingly, the forward-thinkers among them aim to fix things before they have a chance to break. And they’re using technology to help them optimize the way they invest in infrastructure maintenance and renewal.

Cambridge, a small city in Ontario, Canada, is in the vanguard of getting this right. It has been working with IBM Research to develop a system for prioritizing the city’s investments in fixing or replacing physical infrastructure so they meet the public’s needs while making the most of their limited budget. “We look at how we can use technology and revised business practices to make the city work better,” says Mike Hausser, Cambridge’s director of asset management and support services.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Canadians got their wake up call about crumbling infrastructure a few years ago when a series of mishaps and mistakes led to the contamination of the water supply in tiny Walkerton, Ontario, by E. coli bacteria. Half of the city’s population of 5,000 became ill and seven people died. That incident and others led to development of Federal and Provincial regulations regarding asset management. Campbridge, in anticipation of those regulations, pro-actively created an Asset Management Division to comply with regulations and to better understand and manage its infrastructure debt and deficit. A few years later, after IBM announced its Smarter Planet agenda, the two organizations began working together on a capital investment management system that’s being tested in the city today.

The system, called PALM (for Planning Analytics for Asset Lifecycle Management), is integrated with Cambridge’s pre-existing asset management and logistics systems. Working together, the systems help managers answer a series of key questions: What do I need to do? How should I do it? What funding will support it? And how should I optimize my activities so I get the maximum return on investment?

The IBM Research team that designed PALM had just completed a major technology project in a similar vein for the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Dept. They conducted a series of meetings with Cambridge leaders in mid-2011 and then agreed to collaborate on a so-called First of a Kind (FOAK) project. “I’m a math guy sitting with a guy who has 30 years of experience in fixing roads and water pipes. He knows a whole lot more about that stuff than I do,” recalls Tarun Kumar, the researcher who heads the IBM team. “We didn’t have a lot in common on the surface, but we came up with something that’s unique–a common innovation agenda.”

The infrastructure investment project was high on Cambridge’s priority list. That’s because it’s facing a ticking infrastructure time bomb in the coming decades. The city of 135,000 went through growth spurts in the 1950s, the 1970s and the 1980s. In each case, new roads and water and sewer pipes were installed. Since then, the city has invested in basic maintenance, but it hasn’t yet taken on the more challenging task of replacing large chunks of infrastructure (road, water, and sewers) before they fail.  And some of them are beginning to fail now.

For example, in the 1960s the city installed thin-wall cast iron water main pipes made from new metal alloys that were designed to save money and materials. Unfortunately, about half of the pipes are starting to break down–decades ahead of their original life expectancy.

When a city starts contemplating digging up a lot of water mains, it has to take into consideration the other stuff that’s nearby–including roads, sidewalk and sewer lines. This is where the analytics comes in. The IBMers gathered millions of discreet pieces of information about the city’s 250,000 critical transportation and public works assets drawn from the records of multiple city departments. That’s a lot of data to manage, but, adding to the complexity of the challenge, some vital information is missing. The city has only 10 years of asset management information, and, in many cases, it doesn’t know the condition of the pipes buried deep underground in specific locations.

The IBM Research team developed technology that is now enabling Cambridge’s leaders to make strategic and operational decisions. The researchers developed algorithms to predict which assets will fail and when. Those predictions feed into a needs-assessment engine that helps city planners to identify the options they should consider. Should a water pipe be relined or replaced? Should a road be repaved with a thin overlay or should it be reground and resurfaced? Each option comes with a cost-benefit analysis. In addition, the technology allows planners to consider other factors, including the effect that one repair would have on other nearby infrastructure. That way, the city managers hope to avoid situations like having to dig up a road to replace water pipes just a new months after the road has been repaved. Better to wait to repave after the digging is done.

The prescription options are then fed to an investment planning tool that helps planners choose the best funding sources for each project. The analysis tool considers factors such as criticality, risk and funding constraints. When planners put forth their investment proposals to elected officials, they can back them up with solid facts and rationales.

This kind of technology has potential not only in cities but in any industry that buys a lot of equipment and maintains a large physical infrastructure. Think oil and gas exploration and distribution companies, and electric utilities. They all need to better  manage the stuff they own. “Companies need to listen to their assets so they can figure out what they need to do,” says Kumar.

Listen to your assets. That has a nice ring to it. In the era of big data, you can bet we’ll be doing a lot of listening.

Technorati Tags: Cambridge, IBM

by Bob Jones, COO/General Manager, Desert Mountain Club

With a population expected to exceed nine billion by mid-century and a fixed water supply, the world’s demand for water is quickly outpacing its supply.

We rely on steady seasonal rainfall to restore our ground water sources, but droughts are becoming more frequent, often forcing communities to enforce stringent water restrictions.

Nearly half of the world’s 6 billion people live in water stressed areas.  Eighty countries already have water shortages, and the World Bank warns that the demand for water doubles every 21 years. Thirty countries already get more than one-third of their water from other regions.   And treating the water we do have to make it safe for consumption requires great amounts of energy and generates as much carbon emissions as a passenger jet.

Growing the food we eat consumes 70 percent of our freshwater supply.  And much of the remaining amount is used extravagantly at home. A family of four typically uses 260 gallons of water a day, mostly in the bathroom.  Flushing toilets, using faucets, and taking showers or baths account for 75 percent of the total.

At the Desert Mountain golf community, we are partnering with the City of Scottsdale and the State of Arizona to utilize treated effluent, or reclaimed water, to reduce our water footprint. To further reduce our footprint, we are using a deeper level of analytic insight that also saves energy and cuts operating costs. More importantly, everything that’s done at Desert Mountain is done with the indigenous plant life and wildlife of the community in mind.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For many years now, Arizona has been in a drought. In fact, we’re supposed to average 12 inches of rain annually, but we haven’t had that amount in many years.   So at Desert Mountain we’re implementing a water conservation program that will help us become even more efficient and better prepared to meet water shortages and environmental changes.

The information we collect from underneath the ground and from weather stations helps us make better decisions on how much watering to do.  The less water we use, the more energy and costs we save on treating and transporting water. We are not only making our business more efficient, but we are also playing a role in conserving a precious natural resource.

To date, we’ve saved eight to 10 million gallons of water by understanding the data we’re getting from the sensors in the ground that tells us when moisture levels are low or when there is water leak.  And we can react faster to that leak.

If you look at the people who live here, you’ll see that Desert Mountain is a community of leaders. We are taking a proactive stance to become better stewards of the land and in becoming educators on the role we all can play in protecting our natural resources.  That’s the goal we’ve set for ourselves going into the future.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, water

Laurie Arthur is a farmer in the heart of Australia’s bread basket, the basin of the Murray River, who was kind enough, when I was trying to understand water, to explain how water works for farmers.

Arthur lives out in the wide open country east of Adelaide and north of Melbourne — flat, irrigated farmland where his nearest neighbor is 12 miles down the road, and where his white farm truck is often flanked by squads of kangaroos, who have no trouble keeping pace as he drives from field to field at 40 or 50 mph.

Arthur lives comfortably in a world most of us never visit, and even have a hard time grasping. He farms 10,000 acres. That amount of land is impossible to visualize, but its scale is easy to bring down to Earth.

He took me to a single 150-acre field, which seemed to spread out in all directions toward the horizon. (You could park five Wal-Mart Supercenters, including their full parking lots, on that one patch of dirt.) That single field has a perimeter of 2 miles.

It is 1 percent of Laurie Arthur’s land.

If the land Arthur is responsible for cultivating is hard to grasp, the water he uses to make it blossom it is truly astonishing.

To raise a single year’s crop, Arthur uses 1.6 billion gallons of water (6 billion liters) — a big slug of water. It’s enough to supply all the water needs for a town of 40,000 people, for a year.

One guy, with one farm, using as much water every single day as a city of 40,000 people.

Laurie Arthur has the charm and wry humor we find so irresistible in Australians — the disarming confidence that comes from being self-reliant, the bemused understanding that in the developed world, farmers are far more alien creatures than, oh, astronauts.

He has introduced himself at school parent events as a farmer, and had fellow parents turn to him matter-of-factly and say, “Oh, you’re a water waster, then.”

What is Laurie Arthur doing with all that water, anyway?

He’s raising food.  Rice, to be specific.

In a year when everything goes right, Arthur raises 20 million pounds of rice, using those 1.6 billion gallons of water.

Is that good, or is that cavalier?

Well, with enough water to supply a city of 40,000 people for a year, he raises enough food to feed a city of 100,000 people for a year — all 100,000 people, 3 meals a day, for 365 days.*

Arthur smiles. “How much is the right amount of water to feed a city of 100,000 people?”

Today is World Water Day. The point of World Water Day is to draw attention to our favorite, our most familiar, and our most taken-for-granted resource. There is a delightful irony for water folks in the fact that World Water Day is itself mostly ignored by everyone outside the world of water. (Could we start a day to draw awareness to World Water Day?)

Every person on Earth revels in water every day, in some fashion — whether we celebrate water or not.

This year, the theme of World Water Day is the connection between water and food. Although most of us never think about water when we tuck into an omelet, or a turkey sandwich, or a dinner of salad, steak and rice pilaf, there is no more intimate connection than that between water and food.

The connection is so close, that for water folks there is a handy rule of thumb: In the developed world, 1 calorie of food requires 1 liter of water to produce.

A large tomato has 33 calories — it required 33 liters of water to grow (almost 9 gallons).

A 12-ounce can of Coke or Pepsi has 140 calories — so it required 140 liters of water to produce; 12 ounces of soda requires 37 gallons of water — if you reach back and include the water necessary to raise the sugar in the soda.

A medium-sized McDonald’s Big Mac Value Meal — Big Mac, medium soda, medium fries — has 1,130 calories, so the food required 1,130 liters of water, about 300 gallons.

The standard daily U.S. diet of 1,800 calories requires about 475 gallons of water to produce — every day, for every American.

The 1-calorie-1-liter benchmark is a rough average. It takes far less water, for instance, to grow a pound of tomatoes than to grow a pound of beef.

What’s handy about the rule is that it is a great way of waking up to how much water our food requires.

The average American uses 99 gallons of water at home each day — real water, for showering and dishwashing, for toilet-flushing and making lemonade.

The average American uses another 250 gallons of water a day at home for electricity — the electricity that each American uses, just at home, requires 250 gallons a day to generate. That’s real water too, of course, we just never see it.

And the average American uses another 475 gallons of water day for food.

The food you eat each day requires five times the amount of water to create as the amount of actual water you use each day.

And that’s true for the whole world. Food — farming — is the most important part of the world of water.

Worldwide, farmers use 70 percent of the water used each day.

And farming is not very efficient. The general rule of thumb is that farmers waste half the water they put on their fields. In the world of water, that “wasted” water has a very precise meaning. It means that half the water farmers use doesn’t increase their production at all — they could, with better management, use half the water they do and produce the same amount of food. Or they could use the water they are using and grow twice the amount of food.

But that inefficient use of water is actually good news.

In the next 35 years, we’re going to add 2 billion people to the world. For every hundred people already here, we’re going to add 29 more. They are going to be thirsty, and they are also going to be hungry — which, as we’ve seen, is a form of thirst.

Current farming methods in many places are so water-inefficient that there’s plenty of room to produce more food without having to use more water.

In fact, one of the most dramatic stories comes from the farms of the United States.

Water for irrigating U.S. farms peaked in 1980 — more than 30 years ago, when there were 80 million fewer people than today.

U.S. farmers use 15 percent less total water today than in 1980, and they produce 70 percent more food. U.S. farmers have increased their “water productivity” by 100 percent in 30 years.

That’s exactly the kind of progress we need to make to have both enough food for 2 billion more people, and enough water.

So what about Laurie Arthur, the Australian farmer who uses enough water for a city of 40,000 people to produce enough food for 100,000 people?

By almost any standard measure, Laurie Arthur is doing very well.

In the U.S., remember, our food requires five times the amount of water as the actual water we drink.

In the “city” Laurie Arthur is supplying, the ratio is the opposite: The food for each person he’s feeding would require half the amount of “real” water that person would use in a typical day.

Using the 1-calorie-1-liter rule, Arthur is doing even better.   Every liter of water he uses produces not one calorie of food, but six calories.

Still, even on a well-run farm, with a man who thinks about water all the time, the water required is mind-boggling.

A single, appealing mound of Japonica rice on your dinner plate tonight requires 14 gallons of water to produce. Imagine that fluffy pile surrounded by 14 gallon jugs of water. It seems truly astonishing. But it’s a window on how removed we’ve become from the work required to get us our food — and the water, too.

Every day is world water day, we just don’t realize it.

_____________________

* If you doubt the math that 20 million pounds of rice is enough to feed 100,000 people for a year — the short version works like this. That comes to 4 pounds of rice per person, per week — and one pound of dry rice provides about 3,200 calories. So four pounds is 12,800 calories, or 1,800 calories a day. Not that you’d want to eat rice three meals a day, for a year — or that you could survive nutritionally on it. But Arthur’s point is that he raises enough calories to feed a city for a year, and he’s right.

Technorati Tags: agriculture, australia, Charles Fishman, IBM, Smarter Water, world water day

Today, as a scientist with IBM Research, Vortman’s job is to come up with breakthroughs that enable water utilities to conserve water and money, while at the same time providing the water that consumers want and need. She leads a team at IBM Research – Haifa that designed a new system for monitoring and managing water pressure that could provide a model for many cities and communities seeking to deal with tight water supplies and growing demands. IBM has put the system to work for the Sonoma Country Water Agency, which serves more than 600,000 customers in Northern California. The first pilot is being done with the Valley of the Moon Water District, one of the distributors of the agency’s water. “We found that if we can manage the pressure in a flexible way, everybody can benefit,” says Vortman.

IBM has been working with the water agency for several years to help it improve efficiency and balance the needs of consumers and the natural environment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The latest work with the agency, which is led by IBM Research – Haifa, is aimed at addressing a conundrum in water management: how do you keep pressure at the right level for users without worsening leaks and wearing out equipment? The answer, according to Vortman, is that water utilities have to view their systems holistically and manage them more precisely. They must view the water system as a complex entity and come up with a way of optimizing it to produce the most efficient and effective results–just like you optimize a transportation system, an electrical grid or a company’s supply chain.

In the past, Sonoma kept the pressure high on the entire water-delivery system so it wouldn’t get complaints from customers. But that put a lot of stress on their equipment. Vortman and her team tapped data analytics to help address the problem. Using the agency’s existing pressure and flow meters, they have mapped the system and created a statistical model integrated with hydraulic simulation that they use to simulate what happens when pressure is increased or decreased in specific areas. Using the simulations as a guide, the agency’s engineers manually adjust pumps and valves spread throughout the county.

The system was installed in October, and, already, Vortman says, it has helped improve the agency’s efficiency. The agency avoided massive pressure spikes, which happened before, to deal with localized pressure deficiencies. Vortman and her team are now working on refinements that will make it easier for the agency to spot the location of leaks in pipes and other equipment so they can be fixed quickly and affordably.

For Vortman, better water management is more than just a job; it’s a quest. “Every country has to come up with new ways of dealing with water. Analytics can help,” she says.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Sonoma County Water Agency