Artemis Water Strategy

Water resilience for a thirsty future

Dec 08 2010

New York could be first state to ban controversial drilling practice

New York Gov. David Paterson, left, with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

  • New York’s state assembly passed a limited ban on hydraulic fracturing
  • Also known as “fracking,” it’s a controversial method of drilling for natural gas
  • The EPA is studying whether fracking contaminates ground water

(CNN) — New York could be the first state in the country to impose a limited ban on a controversial method of drilling for natural gas.

This week, the state assembly passed a hydraulic fracturing moratorium bill, which is currently en route to New York Gov. David Paterson’s desk. He will have 10 days from then to take action.

In the past, Paterson has expressed concern about hydraulic fracturing, which involves cracking thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface to get at valuable natural gas. It is unclear if the governor will sign or veto the legislation.

“He’ll hear what everybody has to say,” a representative of the governor’s office told CNN. She would not provide her name.

Read the full story.

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Highlights & Features · Tagged: highlights & features, news & events, press

Nov 05 2010

Ceres Conference: May 11-12, 2011

This year has seen an unprecedented number of challenges and disasters – the Massey coal mine collapse, the Senate’s failure to act on climate and clean energy and, of course, the BP oil spill. We already knew time was running short in implementing sustainable economic solutions, but we’re now seeing the stark, deleterious effects of business as usual: lives have been lost, ecosystems ravaged, more jobs exported overseas.

We have the technical know-how to bring about major change.  And many companies and investors have been thinking creatively and moving decisively to transform the way they do business.  Now it’s time to create the collective will to move forward, innovate our way past obstacles, and bring sustainability solutions to scale.

Please join us in Oakland on May 11-12, along with fellow leaders in the corporate, investor, labor and NGO worlds.  Together we’ll capitalize on our collective energy and creativity to move toward a truly sustainable global economy. Learn more about the conference.

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Events · Tagged: events, news & events

Nov 05 2010

Making Every Drop Count

Artemis Project Top 50 winner Takadu was mentioned in the Economist special report titled “It’s a Smart World” highlighting emerging technologies and trends around the use of sensors, data and analytics. A special section in the report is dedicated to ‘the Smart Water Utility’.

A special report on smart systems

Making every drop count

Utilities are getting wise to smart meters and grids

Nov 4th 2010

LONDON’S streets can be a bit of a maze, but below ground things are even more complex. Water pipes crisscross the city in all directions. Some areas used to have competing water companies, each of which built its own system. Not even Thames Water, the utility that operates the British capital’s water-supply network today, knows exactly where all the pipes run.

Moreover, the network is ageing. Only a few years ago more than half of the 10,000 miles (16,000km) of water pipes below the streets of London were over a hundred years old and often burst. It did not help that over many years Thames Water, which was privatised in 1989, failed to invest enough. By the mid-2000s London had one of the leakiest water-supply systems in the rich world. Every day nearly 900m litres of treated water were lost and 240 leaks had to be fixed.

Over the past five years, though, Thames Water has replaced 1,300 miles of cast-iron Victorian mains, those most likely to break, with plastic ones, reducing leakage to 670m litres per day. And when the firm puts in new pipes, it also installs additional wireless sensors, giving it a better view of its network. “We can now tell where we have a broken main even before customers call us,” says Bob Collington, its head of asset management.

In this special report

  • It’s a smart world
  • A sea of sensors
  • » Making every drop count «
  • Living on a platform
  • Augmented business
  • The IT paydirt
  • Your own private matrix
  • Sensors and sensibilities
  • Horror worlds
  • Sources and acknowledgments
  • Offer to readers

Thames Water not only needs to know what is going on in its network, but to be able to act quickly on the information. The same is true of infrastructure operators around the world. Whether in water, power, transport or buildings, all are trying to turn their dumb infrastructures into something more like a central nervous system. That makes them pioneers of the convergence of the physical and the digital world.

Putting sensors and actuators (devices to control a mechanism) into physical infrastructures is not exactly new. Known as “supervisory control and data acquisition”, such systems have been around for decades. But many still require human intervention: workers have to be sent out to download sensor readings or to fix problems. And even if sensors and actuators are connected, different types often feed into incompatible systems, so they cannot be easily combined to automate processes.

The operations centre of Thames Water in Reading, to the west of London, is a good place to see both the old and the new—and soon the future. A big video screen shows expected precipitation over the next few hours, and workers monitor the water level of reservoirs on their own screens. But if one of the pumps fails, they may still have to make a call: not all the valves can be remotely controlled.

Thames Water is investing £100m ($158m) so it can take action remotely and automate a lot of its processes. If the project works, the system will not only automatically deal with leaks but also schedule work crews and send text messages to affected customers. Employees in the operations centre, explains Jerry White, the utility’s head of operational control, will then spend less time monitoring the network and more on making the utility’s processes more efficient.

A big chunk of this work will be analysing the data collected by all the systems and correlating them with other information. Not every unexpected spike in the water flow is the result of a leak, says Mr White. For instance, water use leaps after dark during Ramadan and at half-time during World Cup football matches.

One day soon Thames Water may even be able to send out work crews before a main actually breaks. In early 2010 the firm began using a web-based service provided by TaKaDu, an Israeli company, that acts as the network’s “eyes and ears”, in the words of Amir Peleg, its founder and boss. The firm analyses historical and online data to provide a basis for comparison, enabling its algorithms to detect things that are about to go wrong.

Similar progress is being made all over the world. The scope for preventing waste is enormous, in the water industry and elsewhere. Power utilities are well ahead, not least because they can use the grid itself to collect sensor data and control switches. Transport systems are behind, particularly roads, which often use nothing more than traffic cameras. Even buildings are getting more automated, with continuous checks on their energy use.


At the edge

For infrastructures to become truly smart, however, it is not enough to put more intelligence into the core of a network. The edge—the interface with users and devices—also has to become clever. This is the idea behind smart metering, which has made a good deal of progress in the power industry. According to Accenture, a consultancy, there are about 90 smart-grid projects around the world today. By the end of last year more than 76m smart meters had been installed worldwide. That number will almost treble by 2015, to 212m, estimates ABI Research.

Smart meters and other gear needed to make grids more intelligent will not come cheap. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, predicts that the worldwide smart-grid market alone will grow from $20 billion last year to $100 billion in 2030. Yet the benefits also promise to be huge: power savings, reduced investment in electricity generation and lower carbon emissions.

The place to go to see the technology in action is Boulder, Colorado, home to what is considered the world’s first fully fledged “smart grid”. The local utility, Xcel Energy, did not skimp. It deployed equipment that automatically reports power cuts. It installed more than 20,000 smart meters, connected them via a fibre-optic network, launched a website to track power use and has started to offer pricing plans that encourage shifting consumption to off-peak hours. It has even equipped some households with gear that tells air-conditioning systems to turn themselves off when demand for electricity is high, a mechanism called “demand response”.

The results so far are mixed. The system has certainly helped Xcel to run its grid more efficiently. The utility now knows what is happening in its network and power cuts have become rare. Problems can be pinpointed and fixed much more quickly. But customers are not using much less power than they did before.

Yet it is early days. Some firms are already beginning to show what can be achieved with demand response. EnerNOC, an American energy middleman, for instance, pays other firms for allowing it to shut down their non-essential gear at times of peak demand, thus freeing up capacity. By mid-year some 3,300 customers, from steel plants to grocery stores, had signed up. Their combined consumption, which can be made available to other users if needed, is 4,800MW, exceeding the output of America’s largest nuclear plant.

The ultimate point of smart grids, however, is to allow dynamic pricing, with electricity charges fluctuating in response to demand. This could cut power demand by 10-15% during peak hours, estimates Ahmad Faruqui of the Brattle Group, a consultancy—more than twice the reduction likely to be achieved by just giving customers real-time information about their usage. That number could easily double again, he says, with a combination of dynamic pricing and demand response.

The main objective of smart power meters is to lower the peak load and thus enable utilities to keep down their peak generating capacity. In the water industry the economics are somewhat different, explains Stefan Helmcke, a water expert at McKinsey. Water can be easily stored and consumers have less discretion over when they use it (for instance, people cannot defer going to the toilet, which uses more water than any other activity at home), so the case for smart water meters is weaker.

Yet they are spreading all the same. Boston has long been the shining example. As early as 2004 the city’s Water and Sewer Commission had equipped almost all its customers with wireless smart meters. But it will soon be outdone by New York, which plans to install more than 800,000 of the devices at a cost of about $250m. Even Thames Water, most of whose customers have no meters of any sort, is now planning to install some of the smart kind.


Getting on board

In transport the equivalent of a smart meter is a vehicle’s on-board unit. That used to be a simple device, working like a radio-frequency identification tag when it passes under a gantry on a toll road, but it is also getting smarter. Germany’s Toll Collect system, which ensures that lorry drivers pay for using the country’s crowded motorways, relies on gadgets that are in some ways as clever as a smartphone. Among other things, they keep track of their position with the help of GPS, the satellite-based global positioning system.

Such toll systems are multiplying, particularly in big congested cities, including London and Stockholm. But it is Singapore that leads the pack. The city-state not only charges drivers for using much-travelled roads (driving on an expressway can be S$6, or $4.60); it also adjusts traffic lights to suit the flow of vehicles, uses data collected by taxis to measure average speed and is developing a parking-guidance system, noting that cars looking for somewhere to park are now a big cause of congestion.

Singapore may also become the first city to introduce real-time dynamic pricing on its roads. In 2006 the Land Transport Authority tested a traffic-prediction system built by IBM to set the tolls. And next year it plans to test a satellite-based system that does not require gantries and can charge according to how congested a road is at that particular time.

Another of the island’s infrastructure-management systems has become a model for the world: that for water. At the information centre at the southern tip of the island, next to the Marina Barrage, visitors can literally get a taste of it by picking up a bottle of “NEWater”, waste water that after extensive treatment has become potable again. But most of the treated water is fed back, via a separate distribution system, to Singapore’s factories and power plants—and then treated again.

This closed loop is part of a water-supply system in which “every drop counts,” in the words of Yap Kheng Guan, a director at the island’s Public Utilities Board (PUB). The Marina Barrage is another case in point. It was inaugurated in 2008 and acts as a tidal barrier to keep seawater out, thus turning the island’s most populated district into a water-catchment area and the harbour into a reservoir. When two other reservoirs are opened next year, more than two-thirds of Singapore’s territory will be used to catch rainwater.

The city-state’s desalination plants are also among the world’s most efficient. All this means that the island—smaller than Luxembourg and home to nearly 5m people as well as an economy nearly as big as that of Hong Kong—is able to meet more than 60% of its water needs on its own. But it wants to go even further: 50 years from now it hopes to be self-sufficient.

Sensors play a relatively small part in Singapore’s water management because the infrastructure is so new. On average there is only one leak a day. The PUB puts sensors only in a few key spots, for instance where water leaves the reservoirs. Should the system detect a dangerous contamination, that part of the network can be shut down immediately. And if heavy rainfall in central Singapore threatens to flood the city during high tide, seven huge pumps next to the Marina Barrage start to push water into the sea at 40 cubic metres per second each.

So far Singapore has no smart water meters, and at the moment there is no pressing need. Most Singaporeans live in multi-storey apartment buildings, which makes it easy to read meters. But if the PUB wants to reach its target of cutting daily domestic water use per person from 155 litres in 2008 to 147 litres by 2020 (about the same as in India, and a quarter of the figure in America, see chart 3), Singapore will have to become smarter still—and set yet another example.

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Highlights & Features · Tagged: highlights & features, news & events

Nov 03 2010

Water Wisdom for Real Estate and the Built Environment

By Leslie Guevarra
Published September 22, 2010
Water Wisdom for Real Estate and the Built Environment

When access to water seems cheap and easy, why should companies cut or closely monitor consumption in their buildings?

Confronting misconceptions about water availability and offering information about solutions that are available now and in development were the key subjects of “Water in Real Estate — Resilient Operations for Thirsty Times,” a recent webinar presented by the Artemis Project. The San Francisco-based consulting firm focuses on helping companies thrive in a water-challenged world.

“Historically, real estate people have always known that water is a live or die situation,” said Laura Shenkar, founder and principal of the Artemis Project.

For developers, lack of water and water permits can kill a project. For property owners, “it takes a very, very small leak to cause very, very big problems,” including structural damage, mold and building system failure, said Shenkar, who moderated the presentation.

But what’s well known to builders and portfolio managers typically is little known or unheeded by companies and property owners, according to webinar panelists.

With Shenkar, speakers David Pogue, the national director of sustainability for CB Richard Ellis, Rick Ferrara, a senior associate with the architecture firm Gensler, Professor John Macomber of the Harvard Business School, and Dominic Kulik, the founder and CEO of sustainable water company Natural Systems Utilities, examined:

  • The need for smarter, more efficient use of water in the built environment.
  • Best practices by leading companies.
  • Barriers to and opportunities for adopting better water practices and management technology.

Compared to agriculture, which accounts for 70 percent of all water use, the built environment is responsible for considerably less consumption. But water waste in the sector is huge.

The U.S. has one of the highest rates of per capita water use in the world and waste due to old, leaking pipes and a failure to conserve are among the chief reasons for the bloated water footprint, according to a report released this year by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young.

For example, the report said, neglected leaks are responsible for 1.25 trillion gallons of wasted water annually, an amount that’s roughly equivalent to the consumption of Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago combined — a point raised by Shenkar in the webinar.

Corporate buildings account for 12 percent of water use in the U.S., said Pogue of CBRE, noting a statistic from the U.S. Green Building Council. Factors driving better water management by companies include high or rising water rates in some districts, penalty pricing by some utilities that charge double or triple the base rate for exceeding allotted use, and requirements for LEED certification as a green building, Pogue said.

He recommended seven practices for companies to consider:

  • A water audit
  • Weekly water meter readings
  • Closely monitored irrigation use
  • Use of native or adaptive vegetation
  • Water fixture cost/payback analysis
  • Water fixture retrofits
  • Water fixture replacements

Next Page: Five building projects that showcase rainwater harvesting.

Pogue stressed the importance of testing and calculating costs and payback analysis when contemplating changes to water fixtures. For these improvements, “go piecemeal, test and make sure the changes are appropriate for your building and use,” he said. Benefits from innovative fixtures — waterless urinals, for example —  can be lost, if they are not used or maintained properly.

Smart controllers, Pogue added, can deliver returns on investment in 18 months and in cases where existing controllers need replacing, three to six months. Both are considerably better than the 7-  to 10-year payback periods often projected for other water efficiency and conservation measures.

“Most of the buildings in the world aren’t new,” said Pogue, whose company manages 2.5 billion square feet of property and corporate facilities. “We have to live with what we have.”

When companies do build new campuses, there are ways to achieve resource efficiency through sustainable design by combining the best in natural systems and technology for specific projects.
Shanghai Tower
Ferrara of Gensler highlighted five projects led by his firm that are models for water efficiency and use of rainwater harvesting.

Shanghai Tower — A rainwater collection system, whose core component sits at the top of the 121-story foot tower (pictured right), enables the savings of 675 million liters of water a year — enough to fill about 245 Olympic-size swimming pools. Designed as the most water-efficient high rise in the world, Shanghai Tower also will feature grey water recycling, low-consumption toilets, sinks and other fixtures. The building is the largest planned of three supertall skyscapers in Pudong, China, (pictured below, right)

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute — Working with Pritzker prize winning architect Tadao Ando, Gensler is the architect of record on this project in Massachusetts that incorporates “water efficient fixtures and technology every place we possibly could, ” Ferrara said. The project includes porous paving, an infiltration bed and five cascading pools that are designed to acommodate annual rainfall, treat it through a natural cleansing process and recirculate it. The site is designed so that it won’t use potable water for toilets, urinals or irrigation except in an emergency.
Shanghai Tower trio
The Center on Halsted — The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community center features Chicago’s first rainwater harvesting system, which is estimated to save over 500,000 gallons of water per year. Rainwater harvested from the roof and groundwater collected by an underground garage sump pump system are used for flushing toilets at the three-story, 185,000-square-foot facility that opened in 2007.

BP Helios — The project is to include rainwater and groundwater harvesting, filtration and storage. The site also features native plants, minimal irrigation and stormwater retention and filtration.

Pat Lobb Toyota — The car dealership in McKinney, Texas, which opened in 2006, was the first to be certified as a green building by the U.S. Green Building Council. It received a LEED-Silver rating. Rainwater from the roof and condensation from air conditioners are captured in an 8,660 gallon cistern. During peak periods, the system provides more than 24,000 gallons a month for landscape irrigation.

Kulik’s firm, Natural Systems Utilities, designs, develops, owns, and operates ecologically based water lifecycle management systems — including bio-regenerative wetlands and other nature-based and biomimicry solutions — for businesses, communities, local governments and homes.

Such systems can give businesses and others a competitive advantage by meeting water safety standards and slashing use of the resource, while also reducing fossil fuel consumption, building costs in the case of new construction and operating costs, Kulik said. The savings ultimately are passed along to the customer, he said.

John Simpson of the GSA’s Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings was among the participants in a Q&A session who asked about making a business case for water efficiency upgrades.

“A zero environmental footprint is our generation’s moonshot — the emphasis is on not only energy but also water,” said Simpson. “What should be measured? How should it be measured? And how do we make changes pencil out?”

Next Page: The beachhead market for water management tools.

Pogue of CBRE underscored the value of waters audits and weekly meter monitoring, and, where possible, submetering. “We did a study last year of 154 buildings and we found that only 23 were separately metered for tenants — and on average they used 21 percent less energy,” he said.

Shenkar of Artemis called submetering and individual-use measurement the “holy grail for water products.” While an array of tools and devices are available to monitor, measure and manage energy use, they are in the nascent stage for water.

Fielding a related question, Ferrara from Gensler said, “What we see is a strong need for building operators to get meaningful feedback quickly. it’s vital to get them data in a timely manner.” Such information can help facilities managers detect and deal with water issues before they become major problems.

As to financing and investment, Macomber of Harvard said projects and technology that increase business competitiveness —  and minimize risk for damage or cost due to price volatility — are more likely to gain traction among investors.

What’s the best market for developing technology providing drill-down measurement of water use? The lodging industry, according to Shenkar, who termed it a beachhead market. “Venture capitalists look for low hanging fruit, commercial buildings are not low hanging fruit,” she said. “Hotels are a better target now.”

The hospitality industry can benefit more readily from tools that enable better management of any resource consumed by guests and general business operations — as shown by burgeoning industry adoption of energy management systems.

Although commercial buildings present a broad opportunity for resource efficiency in the built environment — there are 74 billion square feet of commercial floor space in the U.S. — getting building owners to pony up for water conservation is currently a tough sell, Pogue said.

A slow economic recovery, a need for swift ROI and a shift from using real estate as a long-term hedge against inflation combine to make water improvements less attractive for landlords than other efficiency strategies.

“While this is a very important issue for us, building owners have much larger concerns about debt, energy, occupancy right now,” Pogue said. “In the scheme of things for building owners, this is No. 26 in a list, of say, 30 things. Something has to happen with technology or regulations to focus attention on this issue. Until then, I don’t think we’ll see dramatic movement.”

The waiting game in the commercial buildings sector has a ripple effect for developers of water technology and products. Eventually, real estate will make a comeback as an “old-style hedge against inflation,” said Macomber — which in turn will make investment in property and improvements more appealing and increasingly necessary for competitiveness.

“The question for a small vendor is: Can you last that long?” Macomber said.

More information on the Artemis Project’s water management webinars is available at www.theartemisproject.com/webinars.

Top image of the Center on Halsted and all insets courtesy of Gensler.

Read more: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/09/22/water-wisdom-real-estate-and-built-enviroment?page=full#ixzz14EPXVAtR

Leslie Guevarra is an editor at GreenBiz.com and its sister sites.

She has been a reporter and editor online and in print, an associate producer and public affairs program host on television, and a podcaster.

Read more from Leslie Guevarra

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Highlights & Features · Tagged: news & events, press

Sep 02 2010

Going Green: September 13th-15th, 2010

GoingGreen Silicon Valley is where cutting-edge greentech CEOs, along with movers and shakers from the biggest industries on earth, meet investors. This two-and-a-half-day executive event features CEO presentations and high-level debates on the most promising emerging green technologies and new entrepreneurial opportunities. At GoingGreen Silicon Valley our editors will honor the Top 100 Private Cleantech Company CEOs. Additionally, up to 50 cleantech CEOs willl pitch their market strategies to a panel of industry experts in our “CEO Showcases.”

Seven hundred greentech CEOs, business development officers, eminent researchers, venture capital and private-equity investors, and leading members of the press and blogging community will attend GoingGreen Silicon Valley. Thousands of webcast viewers from over 100 countries will also tune in and interact with the program. Executives attend GoingGreen Silicon Valley to identify and debate emerging trends, build high-level relationships and create new business opportunities.

Written by Laura Shenkar · Categorized: Events · Tagged: events, news & events

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