What Fast Company Got Wrong About Water Innovation
In its current issue, Fast Company offers a breathless headline “We’re Running out of Water” followed by a searing indictment of entrepreneurs, “It’s a Global Problem — But the Greatest Minds in Silicon Valley Don’t Seem Interested in Fixing the Problem — Why Not?” The author, Jon Gertner, focuses his article on the challenge of desalination technology — as if the entirety of water innovation lay in extracting salt from ocean water.
We are not running out of water. The same amount of water that existed when dinosaurs roamed the earth still exists today. The problem is that we’re running out of water where we need it and our infrastructure for delivering water (especially potable water) is mostly decrepit.
One solution might be to boil the oceans — but the reason most smart people in Silicon Valley aren’t trying to do that is because it’s a foolhardy enterprise. Very smart people are working on solving the water crisis; but they are pursuing more sophisticated and in some cases disruptive approaches.
Software is Eating the Water Sector Too
The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz claims the tagline “Software is Eating the World.” Software is eating the water sector too.
For example, water utilities have mostly relied on staff members for customer engagement. Naturally, there is a limited amount of time that can be spent meeting with residents and business owners. Droplet Technologies is changing that. Now, water utilities can automate their rebate and customer engagement programs using software to handle routine tasks that formerly took hours of valuable staff time.
When customers had questions about their bill, the billing clerk used to write search queries on a legacy database. Now with the support of Dropcountr, meter data management systems can be equipped with the latest technology so that customers can simply access their billing information on their mobile devices. Of course this information is contextualized so that they know right away if they have a leak or if a rebate is available.
WaterSmart Software has followed the lead of Opower, offering home water use reports and online dashboards to hundreds of thousands of households. With the intelligence that their systems generate, utilities can focus rebate programs and other outreach on the homes where these programs can have the greatest impact.
My company, MeterHero, is questioning why we rely on altruistic conservation to solve water and energy challenges in the first place. Why not pay homeowners to reduce their consumption? Each gallon that is conserved can be put to use elsewhere at zero additional infrastructure cost. By crowdsourcing water and energy savings (yes, through software), we can turn each home, apartment, and business into a source of new supply and provide every sustainability-minded individual with a way to truly make a difference.
Hardware Innovation Matters Too
Let’s say that you are concerned about groundwater. Right now, we have two indicators — either your well is dry or not dry. Wellntel is changing how we manage groundwater by providing rich analytics on individual wells and aggregating the data from thousands of wells to provide real-time insight into groundwater availability and quality.
Some companies are building sensors and other hardware devices to measure water flows (Lagoon, Driblet, Water Hero, Sprav). Other companies want to help you use water more efficiently. Very smart minds are behind the Droplet sprinkler, the Skydrop sprinkler controller, and the Nexus eWater water reuse system. Not all of them are in Silicon Valley, but then again, water problems are global and necessity tends to be the mother of invention.
A False Comparison
In the Fast Company article, Danish scientist Peter Holme Jensen quips that “if the water industry were like the pharmaceutical industry, ‘it would be as if they hadn’t invented a new drug in 30 years’.” If all water technology could be reduced to desalination, perhaps this is true. But that would be like saying all pharmaceuticals are Penicillin. Clearly they’re not. And in the water sector, the solution may not be a better drug, but rather more preventative care and exercise.
The U.S. EPA estimates that more than a trillion gallons of water are leaked each year in the United States. One out of every ten homes leaks more than 90 gallons per day. If we just fixed 25% of leaks, we would add an additional 250 billion gallons of fresh, potable water to our supply.
By contrast the Carlsbad desalination plant will produce less than a tenth of that amount at a cost of a billion dollars, making it some of the most expensive water on the planet. Moreover, the estimated energy required for the plant — 3 kWh per cubic meter of water produced — is the equivalent of adding ten extra 60-watt light bulbs in 40,000 homes and letting them burn continuously.
Given the enormity of the climate challenge facing us, why are we holding out hope for technology that will make that crisis worse? The water entrepreneurs that I meet on a daily basis are trying to solve real problems that address not just the scarcity of water, but the broader water-energy nexus and issues related to ecological sustainability. Next time Fast Company is looking for the “smart minds of Silicon Valley” working on water, just ask and we can point them in the right direction.
McGee Young is the Founder and CEO of MeterHero. He was part of the inaugural class of startups in the BREW water technology accelerator in Milwaukee, WI, located in the Global Water Center. He can be reached at mcgee@meterhero.com.
