OPTIMIZING DATA TO

BY CHRISTINA MONEV

The author suggests that the agricultural industry and SEDAPAL should partner with water management service company Ventia in order to ameliorate the issue of water scarcity in Lima’s metropolitan area.

Residents in Lima, Peru, are harmed by a general lack of access to water and sanitation resources in the city. Numerous households have a limited supply of water from the city’s main water utility company, SEDAPAL, while others have no access to running water at all. The local agricultural industry further restricts the amount of water available. Consequently, insufficient access to water and sanitation facilities poses a threat to the health of local communities.

Both the agricultural industry and SEDAPAL should partner with Ventia, a water management company, to ameliorate the issue of water scarcity in Lima’s metropolitan area. The partnership would enable more households in Lima to have a constant supply of water, while businesses, including the agricultural industry, would be able to enhance their productivity and future growth potential.

The Root Of The Crisis

Lima’s location is at a distinct geographical disadvantage, where “the Pacific side represents 21.6 percent of the country, comprises 62.5 percent of the population, and contains just 1.76 percent of the country’s water resources.”1 Residents in the metropolitan area of Lima suffer from a continual lack of access to water and proper sanitation facilities. In Lima and the surrounding area, 11 percent of residents have no access to water, and 16 percent of individuals have no sanitation resources.2

Furthermore, several compounding trends exacerbate the water crisis in Lima, namely the inefficient distribution of resources, the city’s rapidly growing population, and the effects of climate change. In particular, the agricultural sector represents the largest drain on the city’s water supply. Agricultural usage accounts for 88.7 percent of all extracted water, and household usage accounts for only 9.2 percent.3 The large disparity between the volume of water used by households and farms represents the inherent issue of water distribution in the city.

A DATA-BASED PARTNERSHIP

To reduce the overall strain on the city’s water supply, SEDAPAL and the agricultural industry in Peru should partner with water management company Ventia to optimize their operations. Ventia provides water management services to over 2,500 unique sites across Australia, and their proprietary services and analytical processes have a relevant application to the water crisis in Lima. 4 Ventia has experience working specifically with “government, water authority, agricultural and mining clients” across Australia.5

The primary entities involved in the continuation and potential resolution of Lima’s water crisis are the state-owned water utility company SEDAPAL and the broader agricultural industry in the area. Ventia’s experiences with past clientele will enable a knowledgeable transition of their existing services to the water systems in Lima. Due to the complex nature of the crisis, a partnership their Telemetry Information Management System, Ventia analyzes data on several factors, “including flow, level, electrical conductivity, turbidity, salinity, alkalinity, dissolved oxygen, rainfall and temperature.”8 Their Vista Data Vision web portal, “allows authorities and farmers to visualize their data, generate reports and download data for use within other systems…for a fraction of the cost of a traditional data transmission network.”9 Both SEDAPAL and the agricultural industry rely on the stability of the water supply to generate revenue, and the collected data can be useful for the current management of the water supply. Thus, Ventia’s digital tools have the potential to limit the costs associated with water management while also helping SEDAPAL and local farmers secure a steady stream of revenue.

In addition to maintaining current infrastructure or utilizing pre-Incan natural infrastructure in the area to increase the flow of water year-round.11 While these solutions have the potential to increase water access for some households, they do not address the root of the issue, which is the broader misallocation of water. The agricultural industry, which utilizes the vast majority of water in Lima, uses this key resource inefficiently and maintains an irrigation system prone to wasteful leaks.12 Further, the significant allocation of water for farming purposes restricts access to this invaluable resource for locals.

Given Lima’s limited geographical resources, alternative solutions, including, “transferring water from other basins and desalinating seawater,” have been examined. 13 However, taking water from another location presents a major political risk. Individuals residing near other basins with Ventia would allow both SEDAPAL and the agricultural industry to optimize their allocation of water while protecting stakeholder interests.

Ventia’s technology systems provide “monitoring solutions for potable systems, irrigation networks, rivers, water storages, and sewage treatment plants.” 6 The water management company works directly “with irrigation authorities to implement end-to-end managed channel and on-farm measurement IoT [Internet of Things] solutions,” in order to help these entities improve the efficiency of their water systems.7 The aggregated data would deliver insights into each segment of Lima’s water supply, and the information would allow each affected entity to monitor and reduce their usage of water while decreasing their total costs.

By utilizing machine learning as well as infrastructure, SEDAPAL could utilize Ventia’s groundwater analytics tools provided to pursue the most fruitful investments in new water infrastructure. Ventia’s services allow, “clients to monitor water quantity and the efficiency of their network infrastructure,” by using advanced “ultrasonic, insertion, and strap-on flow measurement” methodologies.10 Similarly, farms could utilize Ventia’s data visualization services to determine the weak links in their irrigation infrastructure and the optimal allocation of water for different crops. The combined effects of optimizing efficiency and allocation between these two entities have the potential to drastically reduce the strain on the city’s water supply.

Current Strategies

The current efforts to resolve the crisis are largely dependent upon building new might protest the idea of sacrificing their water reserves to supply the country’s capital. Furthermore, desalinating seawater can be an incredibly costly procedure, one which requires significant additional investments in infrastructure. As a result, neither of these potential solutions has been actively pursued.

Due to a clear lack of proper water and sanitation infrastructure in recent years, SEDAPAL has pursued various investments in an attempt to mitigate the crisis. In 2013, SEDAPAL installed a new wastewater treatment plant to increase sewage treatment “from 21 percent to approximately 60 percent” in the city.14 While this marks a significant improvement in the sanitation services offered to residents, there is still a sizable portion of the local population who does not have access to sufficient sanitation resources.

However, investing in new infrastructure is a more politically popular solution to the crisis, and future projects also present an additional opportunity for the integration of Ventia’s services. SEDAPAL is currently pursuing a series of infrastructure investments, known as its Master Plan, “to improve long-term water reliability in the face of climate change and growing demand” for a total cost of $2.7 billion.15

As a part of their Master Plan, SEDAPAL plans to add “30 million cubic meters of additional reservoir storage” and expand its resources on the most productive projects and construction methodologies.

Actualization Of The Proposal

Through the company’s direct focus on groundwater monitoring, Ventia provides another opportunity for the management of Lima’s water supply. In 2011, the area surrounding Lima extracted a total volume of water equalling approximately 3.6 m3/s.18 To supply the city’s demand, significant groundwater reserves are necessary. By provides 37.5 percent of its water for unbilled accounts, where many of the households who fail to pay “do not have meters” to actually measure the amount of water they use.19 The issue of unbilled accounts reveals two major weaknesses of SEDAPAL’s current system: the company has neither the proper analytical tools to determine the costly drain on its resources nor the proper infrastructure in place.

Through Ventia’s services, SEDAPAL could visualize exactly where their water is

“the Antacoto Reservoir to store an extra 15 million cubic meters.”16 The added water storage, as well as a new tunnel that would transfer water from a mountain aquifer to Rio Chillón, “would cost $129 million.”17 In order to construct a tunnel or expand the capacity of a current reservoir, SEDAPAL needs to conduct extensive research to maximize the total flow of water in the long run. Ventia can install sensors to track the flow of water across these various projects, which allows SEDAPAL to measure effectiveness and focus utilizing Ventia’s specialized groundwater monitoring services, SEDAPAL will be able to monitor the exact supply and extraction of water across each of its wells. The data will be necessary to determine exactly how much water should be extracted at any one time in order to preserve the water supply and protect the future needs of the community.

Other major areas of concern regarding SEDAPAL’s municipal provision of water are the vast inefficiencies that arise throughout its current system. The water utility company consumed across the supply chain. SEDAPAL could then capitalize on Ventia’s machinelearning capabilities to cross-reference the households receiving running water with the households who are paying their water bill. Ventia’s services could be used to determine exactly which locations are authorized to extract water from the system and which locations need to be further investigated. Any additional funding captured from customers would allow the company to invest in more infrastructure to maintain the stability of the water supply.

Beyond its voluminous water consumption, the agricultural industry also adds to the issue of water pollution in Peru. The fertilizers and pesticides used on farms “are washed into the river when the land in this watershed is irrigated,” which results in water contamination.20 Because Ventia’s water management devices can detect the presence of dissolved oxygen, the company’s services have another valuable application for the agricultural industry. Fertilizers, once released into a stream of water, often “reduce the dissolved oxygen content of the water body” through the stimulated growth of microorganisms.21 With their advanced equipment, Ventia could monitor the dissolved oxygen content of the water supply. The company could then work with the farms to determine how to mitigate the release of fertilizers into the supply.

The farms themselves have a direct incentive to limit the amount of fertilizer runoff polluting the water because polluted water becomes significantly more expensive to treat. The highly polluted Rímac River, which is a major source of the city’s water, leads to higher water prices in the Lima area “because water treatment is [more] expensive” with a higher concentration of pollutants.22 Thus, decreasing fertilizer usage and installing more efficient irrigation systems can decrease overall water usage and cost for farmers.

Challenges

While the utilization of Ventia’s services provides an opportunity for farms to save water, the cost of the service itself might outweigh the cost savings. Additionally, while Ventia’s data visualization tools will detect areas of inefficiency within the farms’ irrigation systems, the owners of the farms might have to install costly infrastructure to actually achieve those water savings. Thus, the total cost of the solution for the agricultural industry presents a major barrier to the success of the partnership with Ventia.

Furthermore, the proposed solution does not address the habits of the consumers themselves. Although it can implement Ventia’s services to track the allocation of water across its system, SEDAPAL has relatively little power to influence the actual water consumption of the residents it serves.

SEDAPAL could attempt to limit the total amount of water allocated to each household or impose additional fees above a certain level of consumption, but these measures could also prove to be politically unpopular.23

Between income levels, the consumption of water “ranges from 260 to 445 liters per person per day” for wealthier individuals but only between “16 to 41 liters per person per day” among lower-income households.24 Wealthier individuals are often less sensitive to price increases because the total amount of money they spend on water represents a relatively smaller portion of their total income when compared to lower-income individuals. Thus, the current proposal does not address the lack of incentives for these individuals to limit their consumption of water.

Economic Potential

Despite the challenges, pursuing a partnership with Ventia is critical to stabilizing the water supply in Lima. A lack of access to water and proper sanitation resources can cause devastating health effects. Households with access to the public water network have an infant mortality rate of 15.2 per thousand births, and the figure jumps to 24.3 per thousand births in households without access to running water.25 Furthermore, investments in water and sanitation entail returns of approximately 5 to 46 times the initial expenditure. 26 The benefits of additional and better-maintained water infrastructure between SEDAPAL and the agricultural industry can improve both the water stability and economic outlook of Lima.

Partnering with Ventia would allow SEDAPAL and the agricultural industry in Lima to optimize their water systems by reducing the overall volume of water used and efficiently allocating current resources and capital. The combined effects of a potential solution could lift many individuals out of poverty and improve the general quality of life in Lima while providing economic returns for SEDAPAL and local farms. The success of this proposed solution will be measured by the amount of water available to individuals and the stability of the water supply as a whole, but the proposal’s viability relies on the compliance of water suppliers, managers, and residents. Because many different entities rely on the water supply, water must be equally accessible to all stakeholders to maximize societal value.