Water Utilities 'On Sidelines' Of Smart City Planning

Collaborations between industry and municipalities to bring more smart infrastructure to American cities are sometimes missing an important voice: water utilities.

That’s according to experts at Black & Veatch, an engineering services and consulting business, in the company’s Strategic Directions: Water Industry Report for 2016.

“Across the United States, smart city programs are moving beyond press releases, pilot programs and demonstrations. Municipalities are collaborating with industry and utilities to create roadmaps defining their approach to regional integrated smart infrastructure,” the report said.

“Proactive utilities, for their part, benefit from pushing for smart city programs in ways that align with their strategic goals and investment plans. Water utilities, however, are lagging in the planning process, and risk losing their seat at the table with electric and gas utility peer companies as the smart city programs advance,” the report said.

What’s an example of a smart city project? The report points to utilities in drought-prone areas that have deployed advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to foster customer conservation. AMI, the report said, is one component of the smart city.

Yet there’s something “out of sync” about water utilities’ minor role in the smart city conversation, according to the report.

“Water utilities provide essential services, have a wide distributed network of facilities and assets and support numerous functions tied to electric generation, sanitation and construction among other key city services,” the report said.

“A few utilities with adequate investment resources act as early adopters and collaborators. These early adopters act while other utilities largely remain on the sidelines,” the report said.

So, where should a utility begin if it wants to improve its smart capabilities?

“Near term, water utilities indicated the biggest opportunities lie in coordinating with local agencies to work with them in identifying what others have learned, and in leveraging the data collection networks and tools that others have built,” the report said.

“Today, AMI is the best first step. With optimal deployment, utilities can better predict customer water use to develop active and accurate water consumption information,” the report continued.

Sometimes cities face vocal pushback from a small number of residents about smart meter deployment. Santa Fe, for instance, logged more than two dozen written complaints at its Utility Billing Division beginning “about the same time the city started to replace defective meters with a new ‘smart’ meter-reading system,” The Santa Fe New Mexican reported.

Yet the benefits of smart technology are clear. “In the future, water utilities will increasingly use [data from AMI] to manage many critical challenges and decrease operating costs, identify performance issues, improve customer service and better prioritize infrastructure investments,” according to a previous report from Black & Veatch.