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Communities and industries across every landscape on earth are looking for solutions to the challenges of water supply and wastewater collection.

For water utilities there is political pressure to meet the demands of consumers, industry and business. There is also increasing pressure for good returns to Government for publicly-owned utilities and to shareholders for privatized water utilities.

Regulatory authorities are setting tighter criteria regarding water supply and quality. Environmental protection authorities are setting similarly demanding environmental standards. The water utility industry is driven by regulation but has to operate commercially, to achieve lower capital and operating investment costs.

We need to bring into account fall-out from the global financial crisis. Constrained budgets require water utilities to justify the key planning and operating decisions they make while still maintaining required customer service levels.

Then there is the added burden for water utilities, as some of the biggest energy users and greenhouse gas emitters, to deal with the complexities of carbon emissions reduction schemes and the need to reduce their operational carbon footprints.

Overlay these issues against the backdrop of drought, natural disasters and water re-use schemes and you are presented with a tremendously complex picture – and an urgent need to come up with water management solutions that balance the numerous constraints and decision variables.

Shaun Cox, Managing Director, South East Water - one of Melbourne’s three state-owned metropolitan water retailers – says that “adaptive management” is the key.

“We are now experiencing in the water industry over the last five years what traditionally has been seen as high consequence but low likelihood events now coming to fruition,” Mr. Cox says. “This has meant that a number of us in leadership positions within water utilities are looking hard at risk management frameworks.

“Part of the response is through adaptive management to enable utilities to move quickly and more appropriately to minimize the impact of these events. This is achieved by gaining a greater understanding and knowledge of our water systems to then run and optimize what become ‘intelligent networks’.”

Innovative water utilities in the Australia and New Zealand region are leveraging their GIS systems, hydraulic models, staff experience and the power of computational intelligence to optimize their infrastructure planning, asset management and operations and emergency response activities. This use of adaptive management has led to tens of millions of dollars of savings, reduced carbon footprints and improved operations, while meeting required customer services levels. 

Optimization enhances adaptive management capabilities for water utilities by enabling them to generate and rank the best mix of alternatives – from myriad possible solutions – to meet performance criteria at least community cost. Whether for long-term planning or when rapid critical design and operating decisions need to be made, optimization presents this best solution range to cut time and costs at every or any stage of every or any project.

Continued improvements in optimization methodologies and technologies enable the ever more complex water management problems to be solved by water utilities, who can now ameliorate the risks associated with meeting regulatory and customer demands in a time of intensive financial and climatic pressures.

Click here for the ACEA National Outlook article.

This article first appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of National Outlook, a magazine published by the ACEA. It appears here with permission. For more information go to www.acea.com.au .