Bluefield Big Data IoT Infrastructure Smart water and technology companies are finding a growing customer base in utilities and municipalities, which considers data and analytics as valuable tools for overcoming the problem of crumbling water infrastructure.
More than $20 billion is invested in water metering, data management, and analytics from last year to 2025, globally, according to Bluefield Research.
The mounting fiscal pressure that is forcing water utilities and municipalities to do an extra effort with less is driving this market growth, the analyst firm cleared. This has sparked a raise in demand for innovative solutions to more cost-effectively manage billing and customer management, leakage rates and energy consumption.
“By zeroing in on key drivers of operating costs, water utilities are optimizing their operations with smart technologies,” stated Keith Hays, vice president of Bluefield Research. “The solutions are not new, as they draw from existing equipment, software and analytics tools. But a significant hurdle will be integrating legacy systems with new software platforms.”
These solutions also provide significant cost savings, too. In some cases, they can halve non-revenue water leaks and billing errors, and reduce energy consumption from 20 percent to 40 percent. As much as 30 percent of water utility operating expenditures can be improved almost immediately through more dynamic and real-time system monitoring, according to Bluefield.
The smart water meters, installed throughout the winery’s Hopland, California campus, shall allow Fetzer Vineyards to pinpoint leaks and water waste incidents in real time. Fetzer Vineyards informs that the technology will allow it to avoid unnecessary waste and meet its 2020 water efficiency goal two years early, in 2018.
The smart water sector is expected to heighted to $12 billion in the US and $11 billion in Europe by 2025. Other hotspots for smart water activity include Singapore, Israel, and Australia where water stress and established utility network operators are actually more receptive to advanced technology adoption. European utilities are at the forefront of smart water in terms of operational solutions, while the US leads in terms of metering.Bluefield also cited an uptick of mergers and acquisitions with larger, more diversified players like Honeywell and Xylem moving deeper into the sector.
Last August Xylem purchased smart meter manufacturer Sensus for $1.7 billion. A month earlier, Honeywell acquired Elster Metering for $5 billion.
