water utility Articles
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The 21st Century Water Utility Initiative: how to boost operational performance of water utilities by up to 20%
The 21st Century Water Utility Initiative is a powerful and innovative approach to help water utilities assess their current operational performance, identify improvement actions and track impact year after year. First success cases suggest that cost reductions range from 10 to 20% within 1–3 years, with improved customer satisfaction. This approach can help water utilities in ...
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Assessing human resources renovation needs in water utilities
Human resources are one of the most important assets of water utilities (WUs), being responsible for assuring systems management and playing an important role in the tacit forms of organizational knowledge. In organizations with responsibility for managing extensive, diverse infrastructure with long life-cycles, with adequate service and acceptable risk levels, knowledge transfer between ...
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Innovation results of IAM planning in urban water services
The requirement to provide urban water services continuously while infrastructures are ageing, imposes the need for increasingly sustainable infrastructure asset management (IAM). To achieve and maintain adequate levels of service, the AWARE-P IAM methodology has been applied in collaborative projects launched by the National Civil Engineering Laboratory, in partnership with IST (Technical ...
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The world watches as evides manages steel main with innovative technology, and outstanding results follow
It was a perfect day for an inspection. Under a crisp blue sky, in the polders along a major motorway near Rotterdam, more than 40 water professionals from The Netherlands, Australia and the UK gathered to witness a unique project undertaken by the water utility Evides Watercompany. The purpose of the project was to showcase the 24-sensor PipeDiver®, an innovative tool from Pure Technologies ...
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The Case for Microgrids at Water and Wastewater Facilities
Clean water is essential to modern society. Today, the utilities that pump, treat and distribute water are grappling with extreme weather events, an aging electric infrastructure and increased security concerns – all of which can cause disruptions to their operations. Increasingly, water utilities are turning to microgrids to address these challenges. In this white paper, you’ll ...
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Why We Developed SensorClean
Water utilities have long understood the potential value of the 20+ years of SCADA monitoring data which they store. SCADA data provides valuable context about asset performance, changing community water behaviours, and the effectiveness of utility strategies, amongst many other things. But SCADA data is messy and disorganized and utilities have been hamstrung by inadequate data cleaning tools. ...
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Energy efficiency in water distribution systems – a path to an ideal network: AGS experience
Infrastructure asset management (IAM) gave a step forward in Portuguese water utilities due to recent legal obligations in developing IAM plans. An effort was made by AGS (Administração e Gestão de Sistemas de Salubridade, S.A.), private operator in 17 water utilities, to achieve a higher level of managing data. Data management was an important hurdle to be overcome in ...
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Implementing tactical plans to improve water-energy loss management
Water utilities are aware of the water-energy loss relevance in supply systems. However, they still mainly focus on daily water loss control (real and apparent losses), without considering the impact on embedded energy. Moreover, they are mostly concerned with the economic dimension and, in most cases, tend to disregard the impact that water-energy loss may have on the quality of service, ...
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A utility-tailored methodology for integrated asset management of urban water infrastructure
This paper presents the integrated methodology for infrastructure asset management (IAM) developed in AWARE-P, an R&D project aimed at producing adequate and effective support tools for assisting urban water utilities in decision making and rehabilitation planning (www.aware-p.org). The proposed methodology addresses all three planning and decisional levels (strategic, tactical and ...
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Tackling water loss
Water loss through leaks and non-revenue water are a global issue of monumental scale. A 2018 Consumer Council for Water report revealed that in England alone more than three billion litres of water are lost from leaking infrastructure every day, making water leakage the number-one concern for UK water utilities’ customers. Despite significant manpower-driven efforts to reduce leakage, it ...
By Gutermann AG
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Innovative Pipe Inspection Program Supports Meaningful I/I Reduction for a Large Florida Utility - Case Study
One of the state’s largest water utility is facing significant challenges with excessive inflow and infiltration (I/I) in its gravity collection system, consisting of over 1,500 miles. Precipitation events often result in immediate flow responses within the collection network, at times up to 3 times the average daily flow ...
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Algorithmic network monitoring for a modern water utility: a case study in Jerusalem
We report on the design, deployment, and use of TaKaDu, a real-time algorithmic Water Infrastructure Monitoring solution, with a strong focus on water loss reduction and control. TaKaDu is provided as a commercial service to several customers worldwide. It has been in use at HaGihon, the Jerusalem utility, since mid 2009. Water utilities collect considerable real-time data from their networks, ...
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Digital Transformation of Field Operations in a Water Utility Company Using GIS Cloud - Case Study
Digitizing the process of field data collection and infrastructure data management utilizing the GIS Cloud platform, Liburnian waters achieved a multilevel collaboration with local governments, increased their data accuracy, and reduced job timeframe by eliminating paper forms. The implementation of field inspection via surveys on mobile phones had the biggest impact on their workflow, the ...
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Risk-based approach to manage aging urban water main infrastructure
The growing number of challenges in how to manage aging infrastructures, while maintaining a suitable level of service, have become major problems for many municipal water utility companies. As a result, municipalities are increasingly considering the concept of risk assessment and prioritization as the first and an important step that has to be used towards effective asset-management ...
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Isle Insights: Innovative Approach to Asset Management
It is the underlying infrastructure/assets and the challenges it faces that drive the technology we see in the industry today. Embarking on the Energy and Water Transition Journey: Isle Utilities’ Innovative Approach to Asset Management Isle Utilities has always worked in innovation, and whilst innovation is usually associated with technology alone, it is the underlying ...
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What are LoRaWAN networks and how are they useful in the water cycle?
LoRaWAN networks are becoming a viable alternative thanks to their efficient, low-cost connections and their versatility in numerous water cycle applications, centering on monitoring as the key to greater efficiency. Digital transformation is the biggest challenge facing all water utilities, requiring the right technology to address the main issue of data transfer and analysis. In this sense, ...
By Idrica
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A critical moment to harness green infrastructure—not concrete—to secure clean water
Natural ecosystems provide essential services for our communities. Forests and wetlands, for example, filter the water we drink, protect neighborhoods from floods and droughts, and shade aquatic habitat for fish populations. While nature provides this “green infrastructure,” water utilities and other decision-makers often attempt to replicate these services with concrete-and-steel ...
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How to boost water system efficiency with smart output technology
Water utilities are installing automated meter reading (AMR) and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) systems more frequently. These systems often help utilities improve customer relations and provide valuable real-time data to improve operations. The ability for various meters to communicate with AMR and AMI technology has become more important as these systems become commonplace. McCrometer ...
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Highlights of key international water infrastructure asset management initiatives, and trends, challenges and developments in Portugal
Over the last two decades, remarkable progress in the Portuguese drinking water and wastewater services sector has been achieved. Nevertheless, it faces a serious challenge in trying to ensure long-term sustainability. There is equally scope for considerable efficiency and effectiveness gains. The national strategic plan for the period 2014–2020 has assigned a prominent role to infrastructure ...
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Need Clean Water? Invest in Nature
Securing clean water is becoming increasingly difficult in the United States. Infrastructure like dams and treatment plants are aging, water demand is increasing, and more frequent extreme weather events like wildfires and flooding are driving up the cost of water management. It’s a complex problem, but one of the potential solutions is decidedly low-tech: Invest in nature. WRI’s ...
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