Water Billing World

Two different stories recently have highlighted moves towards smart metering for water.  Smart metering may also mean smarter water billing software.  In a recent speech at Chatham House in London, IBM Chairman, President and CEO Sam Palmisano laid out IBM’s vision of the next decade as the decade of the smarter systems. Among the many areas IBM is focusing on to enable a smarter planet is smart water management.  "By a smarter planet, we mean that intelligence is being infused into the systems and processes that enable services to be delivered; physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold; everything from people and money to oil, water and electrons to move; and billions of people to work and live."

Software lies at the heart of these systems. IBM’s acquisition of MRO Software in 2006 enhanced Big Blue’s decades-long work in the rail, water and other vertical industries by adding asset management capabilities. IBM attained MRO’s Maximo asset management software in that acquisition, and Maximo is a key component of IBM’s Smarter Planet initiatives because it helps organizations track each and every asset across their enterprises—spanning both physical and IT assets, IBM officials said.  You can find more on this story at eWeek.

Not to be left out Oracle, another software vendor, published the results of a recent survey of more than 300 water utility managers: 68 percent said they believe it is critical that water utilities adopt smart meter technologies. At least 36 states are projecting water shortages between now and 2013.  Oracle also found most of the 1,200 U.S. consumers it surveyed felt water conservation was important to them. Specifically, 76 percent said they are concerned about the need to conserve water and said their behavior changes were motivated more by a desire to conserve than to reduce water bill costs. Seventy-one percent said having access to more detailed information about their water consumption would be a key factor in helping motivate their conservation.

IT analyst Charles King said he’s not surprised Oracle would promote smart meter adoption for the water industry. "Someone on the back end has to crunch all the data, and now that Oracle has Sun it can make the case they have a hardware/software solution. IBM (NYSE: IBM) has been promoting the same thing," King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, told InternetNews.com. "Whether you’re talking about electricity or water or some other utility, it’s an enormously distributed, complex network of data."   You can read more details here.

The City of Austin is planning a pipeline that will send millions of gallons of recycled water annually to the University of Texas, part of a wider conservation effort that could lead to significant water savings and eventually lower bills for many customers.  Next month, construction is set to begin on an underground pipeline down 51st and Red River streets, completing a system that will cost the city $17.5 million and send reclaimed, or partially treated, water to UT, one of the city’s biggest consumers. The pipeline will also serve some neighborhoods around the university.

Instead of being discharged into Lady Bird Lake, wastewater will be partially treated at an East Austin plant and piped to UT, which plans to use it at first for water-intensive cooling systems and later for irrigation and other purposes. Treated water will continue to be used for drinking and bathing.  The "UT line" is the biggest example of a push by the city to use reclaimed water. Some lines are already in place, and the city is planning to spend $180 million on such projects over the next three decades or so. Initially, only some users, such as UT, would save on water bills, but as the system spreads to more of the city, more customers would be able to use partially treated water for lawns and pay perhaps half the rates charged for treated water, Mayor Lee Leffingwell said.

One of the key differentiators between water and other utilities is the leaking pipe.  Home owners are sometimes surprised by large water bills, and even more surprised to find that a water “used” by the leaking pipe and measured by the water meter is a legitimate part of their water bill.  In Louisville Kentucky, a waterline insurance program that has raised concerns in other parts of the country is proving more popular with customers than anyone anticipated when it was rolled out in February 2008 — and it has provided a waterfall of cash for the utility.  The program is being offered by a Florida company, Home Services USA, which paid the water company $500,000 upfront, with a 10 percent commission for each policy sold — in exchange for the utility’s endorsement and use of its residential customer address database, which it uses to send direct mail advertising to the utility’s 244,000 residential customers.

The insurance costs $4.99 per month and covers the cost of repairing or replacing underground waterlines that may be damaged from the curb to the outside walls of homes, which are the responsibility of the homeowner. Policy-holders are covered for up to $2,500 per claim, with two claims allowed per year.  The water company and insurer — Miami-based Home Services — were hoping about 10 percent of the utility’s residential customers would sign up. But the 63,995 policies sold through November represent more than double that target.

Water costs are going up everywhere. South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority executives, for example, sought to bolster their request for a rate increase for the third straight year.  They said reduced water consumption over the past two years has forced the utility to dip into reserves and lay off 26 people. The hearing was held by the company’s Representative Policy Board, a 21-member group that oversees the New Haven utility.  The executives used Thursday night’s hearing to justify the latest rate hike proposal. The authority announced last week that most of its residential customers would see their quarterly water bills rise by $9.19, or about 10 cents per day, under the rate increase proposal.

In summary, if you lose less water you will be penalised.  Apparently pricing is not based on rationing a scarce resource.

In the US, so the New York Times reports, more than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years.  That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards.  Studies indicate that drinking water contaminants are linked to millions of instances of illness within the United States each year.  In some instances, drinking water violations were one-time events, and probably posed little risk. But for hundreds of other systems, illegal contamination persisted for years, records show.

American Water Works Co., which operates water utilities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, has rolled out a 24-hour Web site where customers can manage their accounts.  The new site, called My H2O Online, is available at www.amwater.com/myh2o, said Terry M. Maenza, spokesman for Pennsylvania American Water Co.  Customers will need the address of the property and the account number from their billing statement to get online access.

About 900 AquaMaster magmeters have been installed by C2C, a consortium that provides water services to MoD sites in the North, East and Southeast of England, known as ‘Package C’, with more meters planned. With a measuring range of 1000:1, AquaMaster magmeters are accurate across a wide range of flows, making them ideal for this project.  One set of meters measures the overall consumption at each site by monitoring the total incoming water. These also find use for continuously validating custody revenue meters used by local water companies to generate bills.  Another set of magmeters, called "Night line meters," provide a critical indication of leakage levels during periods when legitimate consumption is at its lowest. 

A key capability of the AquaMaster magmeters is the convergence of flow measurement, data logging, and cell-phone text-message technology.   Using this technology, C2C can remotely set the integral data logger to either high resolution (1 measurement per minute) for in-depth investigation of night lines, or a standard frequency (one measurement per 15 minutes) for normal operation.  Once a day, all the readings are uploaded to a central server using text messages sent via the AquaMaster’s built-in GSM facilities.  Once data resides on the server, AutoChart software from Information and Performance Services (I+P) takes over. AutoChart’s Windows-based interface lists all the meters and their readings graphically or numerically. It also shows the status of each meter using a traffic-light alarm system. 

The C2C project is one of the first major deployments of ABB’s AquaMaster meters in conjunction with AutoChart.  The server is secure, permitting authorized persons to read and manipulate data over the internet from anywhere in the world.  “This approach means that C2C doesn’t need to have sophisticated software loaded onto all of its PCs,” says I+P Managing Director, Ashley Roe. “It’s all on the server.”  Enhanced accuracy and calibration The combination of the AquaMaster magmeters and AutoChart software provides higher accuracies than many other systems.

A McKinsey report on global water resources released Monday said that governments must address booming water demand or face grave human, environmental and economic consequences.  “Water needs to rise up the totem pole of political discourse,” said Giulio Boccaletti of McKinsey, the consulting firm that wrote the report, during a press conference. “We need to stop flying blind in making decisions about water without a map on the table.”

The report, Charting Our Water Future, says that that in 20 years, water demand will be 40 percent higher than it is today, and more than 50 percent higher in the most rapidly developing countries. Historic rates of supply expansion and efficiency improvement will close only a fraction of this gap. Closing the future “water gap” will cost $50 billion to $60 billion per year of investment by expanding measures already being taken in some communities to boost efficiency, augment supply, or lessen the water-intensity of the economy.

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, said he expected the report to “de-emotionalize’’ the issue of water management by simply laying out facts in clear terms.  Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe said that water’s value is not adequately reflected in its cost. He emphasized that access to clean water was a human right, but that “it’s not a human right to wash your car, fill up your swimming pool and water your golf course.”  He said South Africa has an example of a sustainable water policy in which households are entitled to 6,000 liters, or about 1,500 gallons per month of free water, after which they must pay.  He also pointed to what he clearly considered an absurdity: that it takes 9,100 liters of water to make one one liter of biodiesel fuel.  “We don’t give value to the most precious resource we have on earth.”

The report said that under an average economic growth scenario and if no efficiency gains are assumed, global water requirements would grow from 4,500 billion cubic kilometers today to 6,900 billion by 2030. The challenge to reduce use is closely tied to agriculture, which accounts for 71 percent of global water withdrawals today.  Centers of agricultural demand — also where some of the poorest subsistence farmers live — are primarily in India, Sub-Saharan Africa and China.  Industrial water withdrawals account for 16 percent of today’s global demand, with growth primarily from China, which alone accounts for 40 percent of the additional industrial demand worldwide, the report said.

Demand for water for residential use will decrease as a percentage of total, from 14 percent today to 12 percent in 2030, although it will grow in specific basins, especially in emerging markets.  Much of the world’s growing demand comes from the developing world. The study was was sponsored by the companies Coca-Cola, Barilla, New Holland Agriculture, Nestlé, SABMiller, Standard Chartered Bank and Syngenta, with backing from the World Bank.

The Cincinnati City Council has authorized their city manager to take the first step in spinning off the city’s water utility into an independent water district.  Council voted 5-4 for the ordinance, which enables City Manager Milton Dohoney to prepare a petition for the creation of a regional district with the Hamilton Court of Common Pleas. That would set in motion a series of steps, including the development of agreements by which the assets of the Greater Cincinnati Water Works would be sold to the new regional water district.  Those agreements would have to be approved by city council and placed before Cincinnati voters before taking effect.

The spinoff plan was endorsed by City Manager Milton Dohoney in May. Dohoney noted the city would receive up to $473 million in payments over 75 years from the transaction. He also argued that Water Works would gain greater flexibility to expand into new service territories.  The proposal was opposed by labor groups, who argued the spinoff would destabilize the Cincinnati Retirement System and force taxpayers to "pay twice for a public water system they already own."  The ordinance that passed Wednesday was modified from a proposed ordinance submitted by city officials in June. Modifications include language assuring that the water-district proposal will be placed before voters before any asset transfer takes place. That’s aimed at complying with a charter amendment adopted by Cincinnati voters Nov. 3. The ordinance also includes new language requiring that the district¹s yet-to-be-developed plan of operation has language "addressing labor’s concerns."