By Guenter Hauber Davidson, MD of WaterGroup
Productivity Commission finds Australia's water policy not up to challenge of climate change and population growth.
"As urban populations grow, Australia's cities need a greater focus on recycled and storm water for both drinking water and maintaining open green spaces." May I add, we also really need to get on with moving our approach on how we measure our water use out of the last century! Most of all, we need flexible supply & demand-based pricing with very strong pricing signals.
We do have the technology, plenty of use cases and the ability to dramatically improve the way we record water use. Yet, we are nowhere near bold enough to adopt this technology and explore the many benefits smart water metering offers.
We lack the political will to boldly move forward, tell our customers that it may cost a little bit more today, but that it will save us huge amounts going forward.
Think in this context, what you could do if you knew every day how much water is getting used?
You could, in days of plenty, like we have in Sydney right now, let your customers indulge in a bit more generous water use – and sell more, i.e., make more money/profit so you can pay for new technology! Now that is a crazy idea: Smart metering to sell more water and use the profits to pay for it!
Yes, I am fair dinkum. You can do that. Because as soon as the rain stops, and we move into the next inevitable dry cycle, you can ratchet up your comms and let your customers know that the days of aplenty need to be wound back.
You effectively have instant and continuous usage information. You can see right away whether your message is hitting home or not. If not, and you need to increase the need to dial back water use, you can ramp up your comms campaign. You can even easily do A / B trials to work out which messages are getting through and which ones are not.
Additionally, by collecting 30 min interval data, or if need be for some periods and a select group, with our latest version of the #NUmeter, you can even change this on the fly and go down to 5 or even 1 min intervals, and by adding in some machine learning (ML) and AI - readily doable these days (ask us how) – you can easily see where and how water is used, especially relative to discretionary use, i.e. gardening, pool backwashing or overflows, excessive showers use, or the good old leaks.
Imagine what you could do with that. You could do a very simple yet very induvial customised granular assessment of essential water use. You can charge for that at very reasonable and affordable rates.
After all, water is an essential good and I do not advocate for a moment that the key ingredient we need to survive, is excessively charged.
What I am proposing here achieves exactly that. We ensure that we always have plenty of safe, secure, high quality water available for essential services at very affordable rates. However, by knowing what water is used for, we can then add in a very significant price hike for non-essential water use, like e.g., gardening.
To me, that sends a very clear monetary signal to the market where you can make a choice how much money you would like to spend on this discretionary water use. If you decide that you do want to have a very lush and green garden in days of drought or can't be bothered to fix your leaks or apply other water efficiency measures, you pay for it – through the nose! But, again, at a rate right that is cost effective for the water utility, i.e., well above the marginal cost of water including an emergency supply like a desal (where that is an option).
I can’t wait for a bold utility that puts their money where their mouth is: It's all about customer service and what our customers want.
So why not use smart water metering as a tool to let the customer decide how much water they want to use, and how much they want to pay for it. Whilst ultimately increasing the bottom line for the utility or allowing to reduce water prices overall. It will secure water so that there is enough for all of us going into the future!
