How to Advance Sustainability With Intelligent Measurement

Strike a Balance

To achieve sustainability, you must balance three competing priorities:

• Social: Ensuring potable water is available and safe
• Environmental: Managing supply and demand of water and minimizing negative environmental impact
• Economic: Providing services while staying within the budget allotted by the city, municipality or other governing body

You may see the conflicts here: Economic constraints often inhibit or dictate the scale of investments to reach long-term environmental goals. Meanwhile, social responsibilities are non-negotiable and must be met without disruption—which may run counter to the need to maintain water sources.

For example, a utility may want to replace aging infrastructure in to avoid water main breaks and other leaks that disrupt service (a social responsibility) and lead to wasted water and the presence of chlorinated water in the ecosystem (an environmental consideration). Unfortunately, funding isn't always available for these projects—or their value is overlooked.

The solution lies in identifying projects that have the greatest returns in all three domains, setting realistic goals and committing sufficient resources. This means taking a classic engineering approach: Define the goal, then identify the knowns and unknowns of the problem. To be successful, actionable data is critical—and fortunately, there are technologies that can help.

Four Features of Actionable Data

The first key to any sustainability goal is measuring the right criteria. The adage that one cannot control what one cannot measure applies here—but take it a step further by determining what should be measured, how often and in what context.

Data gathered should have these four features:

1. Accuracy. Instruments should have a high level of precision. With millions of gallons of water or kilowatt-hours per day, a large margin of error becomes very costly.
2. Repeatability. Measurement devices, like meters and sensors, must be consistent with each other and from day to day. If two devices are reading the same amount of pressure or flow differently, it can lead to false alarms and misdirected action.
3. Relatedness. Utilities need to ensure they are measuring all the factors that could be contributing to a situation. For example, Bernoulli’s equation for measuring water flow through a pipe has four variables: velocity, pressure, friction and elevation. However, if there is air in the pipe, it can change the calculations, so this must be measured and accounted for.
4. Timebound. All measurements must be timestamped so that events can be tracked throughout the day and trends can be viewed over days, weeks or even years.

With instrumentation that can provide accurate, repeatable, related and timebound data, you'll be well on your way toward building realistic sustainability goals.

Integration and Analysis

With good, solid data in hand, the next step is to ensure that it can be analyzed. To do so, it’s important to have technology that not only connects IT platforms but also allows data to be communicated and shared across departments. Then, you can use software—and your own expertise—to comb through it, eliminate noise and detect trends that lead to the most meaningful changes.

Financial resources, staffing and technology skillsets can vary widely. If your utility can’t justify a full-time IT specialist or data analyst, there are opportunities to work with vendors to offset the burden and free up staff to focus on other priorities.

The Value of Intelligent Measurement

As our world changes, a focus on sustainability is critical. For water utilities, it’s more important than ever to tap into intelligent measurement. Through accurate, repeatable, relatable and timebound data, intelligent measurement can help your utility strike the right balance between social, environmental and economic objectives along the path toward sustainability.