Helping water utilities to net zero

Xylem has had a long commitment to supporting communities, protecting the environment and sustainability.

“THE NEED TO solve water and resource challenges has never been greater. This past year, natural disasters and extreme weather has become more frequent, more costly, and more harmful to communities across the globe. Every day, about two billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, and nearly 40 per cent of the world’s population faces water scarcity.”

That’s why Xylem President and CEO Patrick Decker is continually focused on the importance of sustainability to its operations. As an organisation, Xylem fundamentally understands looking after and properly managing water.

There are different challenges and for each country. Xylem Australia & New Zealand (ANZ) is teaming up with water utilities, local councils, and industrial water users to help them as they achieve net zero.

What do water utilities need to report on?

All water utilities participate annually in National Greenhouse Gas Energy Reporting (NGER), an annual static snapshot of emissions. However, the process needs more granularity and accuracy to meet enhanced legislative reporting requirements and societal demands for sustainability.

The race to net zero for any utility focuses on de-carbonising the urban water cycle and its supply chain

Avensor is just one solution offered by Xylem to support its covers all emissions (including Scope 1, 2 & 3). Scope 1 and 2 emissions are those owned or controlled by a company or the water business, while Scope 3 emissions occur from sources not owned or controlled by it.

What emissions are essential to reduce for water utilities to achieve net zero?

The community primarily focuses on CO2 emissions related to energy consumption. However, fugitive-type CH4 (methane) and N2O (nitrous oxide) emissions from wastewater treatment plants are far more potent regarding global warming potential. They should be monitored and measured more effectively through wastewater treatment processes. Buying green or renewable energy, or having energy recovery facilities as a capability, does not change the fact that methane and nitrous oxide are being emitted. These gases need to be tracked and calculated to truly reduce overall emissions. However, more accurate real-time monitoring and modelling of the overall wastewater process is vital.

How can water utilities be confident they are reducing emissions?

A water utility has a complex supply chain comprising many people, assets, and components. Many of these assets are ageing, underground, or both. Some organisations cannot effectively measure, gather, and consolidate enough operational data to properly baseline emissions, risking their net zero initiatives being viewed as “greenwashing.” Corporate regulatory reporting is already a difficult and timeconsuming task for utilities. Adding emissions policy and legislation as a safeguard mechanism will add further complexity to regulatory measurement and reporting.

The challenge for water utilities is pulling the relevant informationoperational-engineering technology (IT-OT-ET) data together, collected from all business units, into a coherent view. Managing this data and developing an effective and efficient measurement system is vital for water utilities to achieve net zero.

Is it all doom and gloom on the road to net zero?

Xylem remains optimistic about its ability to support water utilities worldwide in plotting a course to net zero. Many of Xylem’s products and solutions already measure, gather, and consolidate data to optimise operation and maintenance domains.

The next horizon is how to harness that data. Xylem Vue, powered by the GoAigua platform, brings together disparate network data to positively impact a water utility’s net zero ambitions.

How can Xylem support a water utility in achieving its net zero ambitions?

Delivering net zero outcomes require water utilities to go on a digital transformation journey.

Xylem has a range of holistic solution capabilities to support water utilities in this transformation process. Considering a Smart

Water Engine provides operational performance benchmarking in the context of net zero targets and objectives.

The water utility can then identify opportunities to reduce emissions and prioritise the appropriate activities and investments to impact net zero targets the most. This Smart Water Engine can be confidently achieved via a water industry-proven engine such as Xylem Vue powered by GoAigua.

Understanding treatment processes is vital to water utilities. Xylem can provide AI studies to water utilities for their water and wastewater treatment plants that will help them identify areas where they can improve the performance and resilience of plant processes and positively impact energy consumption.

These process improvements are all modelled using Xylem’s Treatment System Optimisation (TSO) solution in real-time and further contribute to a water utility’s pathway and supporting reporting requirements to achieve net zero.

Combining emissions monitoring and systems maintenance

Coupling emissions monitoring with maintenance optimisation provides a powerful approach to reducing fugitive emissions. Xylem is developing partnerships with global experts in emission monitoring hardware to address this challenge. Optimising reactive maintenance works and implementing a predictive maintenance strategy reduces energy consumption and field staff time. Xylem’s solutions, such as Avensor for alarm routing and

SAM PRO for performance and reliability optimisation, support these strategies.

The third phase optimises the workforce workflows and manages a larger installed base of multiple assets with multiple applications. It effectively reduces costs and operational staff time in the field, which can be enabled by Xylem’s Digital Maintenance (XDM) solution.

The final phase to reach the summit in this process is to bring multiple software applications, remote management/control of assets and various systems to a “single point of truth” platform. This single platform will improve real-time decision support to visualise insights and opportunities to reduce emissions more efficiently. This can be enabled by Xylem’s Aquatalk platform, which has multiple applications from Xylem available and integrated for use.

For more information, visit www.xylem.com.au