project

SmartWater4Europe

European water utilities face many problems related to their 3,5 million km’s of distribution networks. Large parts of water distribution networks have to be rehabilitated requiring investments of € 20 billion/year. Prioritization and optimization of investments is needed urgently. In many countries, water quality needs improvement in order to reduce health risks and resources for water production and distribution must be used more efficiently.

The European Innovation Partnership on Water has established priority areas related to the challenges in water supply distribution networks, focusing on resource efficiency, Smart Water Management and decision support systems. Although the technology components for Smart Water Management are available, the route to application is still uncertain. The main hurdles are: lack of integrated and open solutions; difficulty to comply with user and integration requirements; lack of clear and validated business cases for solutions; lack of business intelligence awareness and lack of political and regulatory support.

Project aims

  1. To integrate and demonstrate twelve innovative solutions
  2. To demonstrate four integrated solutions
  3. To establish and guard integration and standardisation aspects
  4. To establish business cases, deployment potential and market uptake routes

Solution

This project will overcome the hurdles by developing and demonstrating in four important Smart Water Management themes (water quality management, leak management, energy optimization and customer interaction). Twelve innovative theme oriented solutions and four integrated (technological, financial, ICT, organisation, management) solutions will be demonstrated at four well-scaled and real-life demonstration sites in France, United Kingdom, Spain and The Netherlands. These solutions will be tested, validated and evaluated and business cases will be generated.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Program for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No619024.