European Water utilities operate in a context dealing with socio-environmental issues such as water scarcity and technical-economic issues such as infrastructure aging. Additionally, management of drinking water supply faces additional challenges such as managing capital and operational costs; water loss (also known as non-revenue water) due to leaks and other system failures; and water scarcity/conservation. Traditional water meters are limited in their ability to help utilities address these challenges.
The core of the solution lies in the ability to generate, access and use accurate data that Smart Water Metering can provide to decrease operating costs, identify performance challenges, improve customer service and better prioritize infrastructure investments.
SMART.MET strongly paves the way to more efficient and effective drinking water management, providing for example automatic household meter reading and billing, real time assessment of water balances for leak detection, identification of abnormal behaviours and awareness-raising, and ability to identify user-meters defaults, among other functionalities.
However, the lack of common European standards and lack of “open technological platforms” combined to the high transaction cost on the demand side create a lock-in situation in the market and determine a situation of long-term dependency of water operators on technology providers. This determines high average operating costs for water operators and users, as well as collective inefficiency related to the multiplication of different proprietary solutions on the supply side. The aim of the SMART.MET project, led by a group of 7 water utilities, is to drive the development of new technologies to deal with the collection and management of smart metering data, through a joint Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP). The utilities are supported by 6 expert organizations for assessing the technologies, implement the new procurement procedures and disseminate the outcomes of the project to other utilities and solutions suppliers.
Smart water metering presents itself as an effective solution to the challenges faced by the majority of European water utilities today. Indeed, providing access to accurate data in real-time can help decrease operating costs and prioritize infrastructure investments, while also improving the daily management of networks and customer services.
By launching a PCP procedure, the utilities involved seek to promote demand-driven research into new innovative smart meter solutions that fully cater to the needs of utilities
