The Ultimate Guide to Smart City Connectivity

The World Health Organization reports that for the first time, the majority of the world's population lives in a city, and this proportion continues to grow with projections of 70 percent by 2050. Currently, around half of all urban dwellers live in cities with populations between 100,000 and 500,000 people, and almost 10 percent of urban dwellers live in megacities, which are defined by UN HABITAT as a city with a population of more than 10 million. The UN reports that by 2025, 1.8 billion people worldwide will soon be living in areas of complete water scarcity. This water scarcity crisis directly results from rapidly growing populations, increased water use and aging infrastructures in cities.

One of the city's critical infrastructure pieces is its water system. With populations in cities growing, water consumption will inevitably grow as well. The term "smart water" points to water and wastewater infrastructure that ensures this precious resource – and the energy used to transport it – is managed effectively. A smart water system is designed to gather meaningful and actionable data about the flow, pressure, and distribution of a city's water. Further, it is critical that the consumption and forecasting of water use is accurate.

A city's water distribution and management system must be sound and viable in the long term to maintain its growth and should be equipped with the capacity to be monitored and networked with other critical systems to obtain more sophisticated and granular information on how they are performing and affecting each other. Additional efficiencies are gained when departments can share relevant, actionable information. One example is that the watershed management team can automatically share stormwater modeling information, which indicates probable flooding zones and times based on predictive precipitation intelligence. The transportation department can then reroute traffic accordingly and preemptively alert the population using mass notification.

Water systems are often overlooked yet are critical components of energy management in smart cities, typically comprising 50 percent of a city's total energy spend. Energy is the largest controllable cost in water/wastewater operations. However, optimizing treatment plants and distribution networks has often been overlooked as a source of freeing up operating funds by cash-strapped municipalities. Once facilities are optimized and designed to gather meaningful and actionable data, municipal leaders can make better and faster decisions about their operations, resulting in up to 30 percent energy savings and up to 15 percent reduction of water losses.

Water loss management is becoming increasingly critical as supplies are stressed by population growth or water scarcity. Many regions are experiencing record droughts, and others are depleting aquifers faster than they are being replenished. Incorporating smart water technologies allows water providers to minimize non-revenue water (NRW) by finding leaks quickly and even predicatively using real-time SCADA data and comparing that to model network simulations. Reducing NRW also allows municipalities to recover costs incurred in treatment and pumping – this can be significant. A medium-sized city with 100 million gallons per day of produced water that loses 25 percent (not an unusual amount) is incurring over $13 million per year in non-recoverable labor, chemical, and energy expenses.

On the wastewater side, there is a move by organizations such as the Water Environment Federation (WEF) to transform wastewater treatment plants into resource recovery facilities, which includes energy. Several examples of facilities now produce more energy than required for their operations and sell the excess energy back to the grid. While this is not practical for all treatment plants, it is a worthy ambition and can be facilitated by utilizing WEF's Energy Roadmap.