Smart water management offers quick RoI

While many aspects of the smart city vision seem distant and overhyped, solutions for smart energy and water management are not only technologically ready to go today, but offer attractive business cases to the generally risk-averse utility sector.
Trevor Hill, CEO of water management software-as-a-service provider Fathom, explained to Industrial IoT 5G Insights that his company focuses on driving down cost, increasing new revenue and creating an attractive customer experience. He said, in the case of some mid-sized utility customers with around 10,000 meters servicing approximately 25,000 to 30,000 customers, Fathom has demonstrated a return on investment in one billing cycle largely based on enabling a utility to capture new revenue previously lost to improperly metered water usage.
“What happens is they get an immediate cost benefit from just a reduction of cost,” he said. “Revenue goes up between 5 and 25%. We’re saving them money and monetizing the efficiency we generate to capitalize the deployment of smart meters. There’s so much value in the data that there’s enough to generate a monetization or generate an efficiency stream of cash flow, then monetize it in the market.”
Fathom’s platform is hardware agnostic and pulls data directly from smart meters into its cloud platform, which removes the need for a utility or municipality to have modern IT infrastructure. Hill also discussed the customer experience aspect of water management, which relies on peer benchmarking.
“Putting real-time information in customers’ hands … gives you a sense of how you’re doing against your peers. This model has proven to be able to reduce water consumption between 10 and 14%. We have the ability to tune the peer group representation to manage customer behavior and provide them with notifications so they immediately have the sense that today you’re higher than the block average, for example.”
Investment in smart water management solutions, according to a new market analysis from Technavio, is a growing trend.
According to a report abstract: “Countries across the world are facing the problem of water scarcity, partly because of the increasing losses associated with the water pipeline system such as leakages and illegal tapping. For instance, the aged water supply and storage systems in the U.S. have resulted in the wastage of billions of gallons of water every year.”
That’s where smart meters and platforms like Fathom’s help capture new revenue and drive conservation. According to Technavio: “The installation of smart meters has helped the vendors to detect the leakage in pipelines and thereby take appropriate measures to reduce water losses. This has led to reduced water consumption by 20% and energy consumption by 30% across the country.”