Between 2015 and 2025, the world will invest?$35.9 billion?in smart water infrastructure, according to a new study published recently by Northeast Group, LLC, a?Washington, D.C.-based smart infrastructure market intelligence firm.
Water scarcity challenges are becoming more acute across the globe. Countries are struggling to ensure a secure supply of water and in many cases must ration water and invest in expensive treatment and desalination plants. What is often overlooked is the fact that 28 percent of water is lost during distribution due to leakage, theft and billing process failures. Smart water infrastructure ? including metering, networks and software ? is a cost effective means to address this problem.
?Increasing water scarcity and poor distribution infrastructure are major challenges for water utilities across the globe,? according to Ben Gardner, president of Northeast Group. ?Smart water infrastructure has the potential to save?$27.5 billion?per year globally. This is a conservative estimate and potential savings could be much higher.? Smart water infrastructure helps utilities to reduce what is known in the industry as “non-revenue water” (NRW) or water lost before reaching the customer.
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Water is a commodity that is underpriced in many parts of the world. In the study, Northeast Group calculated a ?full cost of water? for each country based on scarcity, capital costs and electricity costs to pump water. Few utilities directly account for the scarcity costs of water, which can be very significant. The study includes case studies from diverse geographies (California,?Australia,?Israel?and?Sao Paulo, Brazil) that demonstrate the costs of water scarcity challenges. In most of these cases, smart water infrastructure is more cost effective compared with alternative solutions. Northeast Group found that about half of the world’s countries fail to achieve cost recovery through their water tariffs, depriving utilities of much needed funds for infrastructure investment. ?
Northeast Group?s study profiles leading industry vendors including ABB, Aclara, Arad, Badger, Diehl, Elster, i2O, Itron, Kamstrup, Mueller, Neptune, Oracle, Schneider, Sensus, Siemens, TaKaDu, Tuv Sud and Zenner among others.
The?Global Smart Water Infrastructure: Market Forecast (2015-2025)?study is 225 pages long, includes forecasts of three market segments for 125 individual countries and comes with an Excel file with more than 7,500 data points and PowerPoint presentation. To order a copy of the study, please visit www.northeast-group.com.
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