Project description
New technology to fill up water resources
Water scarcity from environmental changes is taking its toll on numerous sectors, particularly the energy sector. The absence of effective methods to predict the quantities of water produced from snow and rivers represent a key issue for hydropower companies. The EU-funded Waterjade project is behind a new technology that exploits a range of data sources on weather predictability and satellite information. It aims to help prognosticate the water quantity expected per year with reliable precision. While Waterjade’s clients were initially hydropower plants, the project is now starting to work with public and private entities to predict conditions such as drought or avalanches.
Objective
"Water is called the new gold of the 21st century, yet, due to climate change, water resources are becoming ever more discontinuous, creating hazardous sitations and big uncertainties in numerous sectors, like energy, where water is the primary ingredient for daily operations.
One of the most recurrent question raised by professionals is: ""how much water is there and when will it become available""?
We have developed a new technology, called Waterjade, capable of predicting water resources at high resolution, both in terms of snow and river discharge. Differently from other competitive technologies, it adopts a physically based modeling approach that integrates multiple sources of data, like in-situ stations, numerical weather predictions and satellite data. The advantages are increased accuracy and scalability to ungauged basins.
Our customers are hydropower companies, whom we deliver a service of snow monitoring upstream the production plants, so they can quantify the energy that is likely to be produced in the long run, and a service of short-term inflow predictions to the plants, useful for safety reason and to optimize the energy production. We are extending the service of snow monitoring also to the public sector, that use it for safety reasons (avalanches) and as an index to anticipate drought.
Working with public and private sectors is giving positive feedback, both in terms of credibility and accuracy as we can benefit from the capillary distribution of in-situ stations from public agencies.
The business model is a ""subscription-based Service"" to the Waterjade portal and the market potential is estimated in about 500 M€/y worldwide, with great potential in particular for hydropower, Europe's and world’s largest renewable energy resource.
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Fields of science
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesmeteorology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental scienceshydrology
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringaerospace engineeringsatellite technology
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energyhydroelectricity
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
38121 Trento
Italy
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.