Why Utilities Need to Prioritize Water System Resilience 

At its core, resiliency is the ability to maintain operations, avert major problems and quickly recover from lost connectivity during extraordinary situations. For water utilities and wastewater plant managers, resiliency is necessary to properly serve their communities and meet regulatory requirements, including America’s Water Infrastructure Act of 2018. This federal law mandates that water systems serving more than 3,300 people develop or update risk assessments and emergency response plans that include robust resiliency measures.

How Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) Supports Resilience

An investment in cellular advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) can go a long way toward building resilience for a utility. While AMI solutions are traditionally known as a pathway to improve billing and tackle non-revenue water, cellular AMI adds the benefit of resiliency to ensure utilities provide access to clean and safe water.

Advanced flow meters, running with battery power and transmitting signals through wireless networks designed to promote resiliency, allow remote monitoring of distribution systems. When those meters also include temperature and pressure readings, water utility managers gain significant insight to issues in the system that may need immediate action during an emergency to prevent compromised water from reaching customers.

Additionally, cellular AMI that incorporates residential smart meters with integrated valves provides a superior level of control to boost resiliency. When flooding overwhelms source water with contaminants, for example, it may be difficult to quickly distribute a notice for consumers to boil their water or stop using it altogether. With cellular AMI, water managers can directly notify customers in a specific area, or across the system, via consumer engagement tools to deter water use and protect them from the contamination.

Making the Most of Cellular AMI Investments

There are several keys to selecting an AMI provider to achieve the most effective level of resilience. AMI providers operating on cellular networks are touted as being the most reliable with a 99.999% uptime. Also, consider the benefits of moving to a managed solution for AMI as it shifts much of the responsibility for resiliency to a vendor that is specifically focused and equipped for that goal.

Cellular AMI managed solutions for meter reading allow municipalities to avoid multiple capital expenditures and operational costs, such as connectivity, firmware updates and field support of the network. Built on a Network as a Service (NaaS) platform, cellular AMI solutions include ongoing software maintenance, upgrades and security. Cellular providers offer a clear plan and timeline for infrastructure to be brought back online if it goes down. If significant infrastructure damage occurs, providers often bring in temporary infrastructure to restore service until permanent structures are properly repaired.

Addressing Drought Concerns

As municipalities work to continuously improve their water systems, cellular AMI offers a wide array of benefits that support the foundation of resiliency. This includes drought concerns, which are affecting a significant part of the Southwest and West Coast regions of the U.S. Smart water systems help utilities adopt more sustainable water practices to improve drought resilience. Utilities can identify immediate priorities and establish a plan to preserve water moving forward, which helps to maintain water service for customers and develop long-term conservation strategies to combat declining water supplies.

Learn more about cellular AMI systems, including how your utility can accomplish a successful AMI deployment and start achieving your operation goals.