How innovation and collaboration can solve the clean water challenge

Around the globe there are in excess of two billion people who lack access to safe drinking water, and when it comes to access to safe sanitation, that number doubles. According to the 2018 UN World Water Development report, with a rapidly growing global population demand for water is expected to increase by nearly one-third by 2050. The need to ensure that adequate volumes of water of suitable quality are made available to support and maintain healthy ecosystems has long been established and that message is intensified each year with World Water Day, #WorldWaterDay that takes place on 22nd March annually.

This year’s message is ‘leaving no one behind,’ #water4all, focussing on the billions of people who are still living without safe water – their households, schools, workplaces, farms and factories struggling to survive and thrive. Marginalized groups – women, children, refugees, indigenous peoples, disabled people and many others – are often overlooked, as they try to access the safe water they need.

Meeting sustainable development goals

ABB has identified a number of the UN Sustainable Development Goals it can help deliver. Namely for water, SDG 6, which pledges to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.

To do this we need to stimulate innovation and deliver new technologies and integrated solutions. We have an important role to play by investing in R&D, as well as developing new business models and novel collaborative schemes to make water supply, treatment, and management more efficient. All of these will make a significant contribution to the SDG target 

There remain four fundamental challenges to achieving these goals: an awareness of the value of water; water scarcity; access to safe water; and the amount of available freshwater globally.

There is not one single technology that can resolve all of these issues. Instead we must support optimization of the entire water lifecycle for domestic, industrial, and agricultural use, and strive to ensure that all water-intensive industries are collaborating to reuse water, and reduce energy consumption.

This cross-sector approach is crucial - water losses from leakages can be plugged, municipal wastewater can be treated and reused for agricultural purposes and industrial wastewater can be treated and reused to grow food.

This is where companies like ABB come in. We have a big part to play working with our customers and authorities, putting our technical knowledge at their disposal to find solutions that are feasible, economically viable and adaptable to different local needs.

Water is a global issue, but it requires local solutions. Often this means working from a strategic standpoint to define the best guidelines to support the transition to a more resource-conscious model. Although we are primarily a technology company we can, and we must, have an important role in influencing the market.

Managing growing demand

The global demand for water has been increasing at a rate of about one percent every year driven by population growth, economic development and changing consumption patterns. Much of the growing demand for water occurs in countries with developing or emerging economies.

For the past quarter of a century water pollution has worsened in almost all rivers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The deterioration of water quality is expected to further escalate over the next decades, and this will increase threats to human health, the environment and sustainable development.

In developing regions such as Africa, the scarcity of clean water is a clear hindrance to economic development. The UN estimates that Sub-Saharan Africa alone loses 40 billion hours per year collecting water. The social and economic effects caused by a lack of clean water are often the highest priorities of African communities.

Facing the African challenge

We have delivered many water supply, treatment and transfer schemes, especially in Africa. One of the most recent is the North-South Carrier in Botswana, where our solutions automate and power the pipeline and pumping stations that carry water from the north to Gaborone, the capital, in the south.

The climate is arid, rainfall is not always dependable, and droughts last several years. The region has reservoirs in the north east of the country, however in the south, the population of the capital is expanding rapidly, increasing demands for water.

Under the Botswana National Water Master Plan, a huge-scale water infrastructure project – the North-South Carrier – was launched in the mid-1990s. The first of phase was completed in 2000 and saw the Letsibogo Dam constructed in the country’s northeast along with an approximately 360-kilometer pipeline to carry the water south to Gabarone, as well as pumping stations, treatment plants and other infrastructure. The percentage of people with access to safe drinking water rose from 77 percent to 96 percent between 1996 and 2006. The second phase is now ongoing and will duplicate the pipeline to carry water from the new Dikgatlhong Dam, which was completed in 2012. ABB has been involved in this second phase supplying a power and automation solution for a new water pipeline and pump station.

Supplying clean drinking water to communities

Another country that suffers from the lack of a safe, clean water supply is Sri Lanka. 

Over 21 million people inhabit this densely populated Indian Ocean island and while 95 percent of the country has electricity, less than half enjoy pipe-borne water from the National Water Supply and Drainage Board.

Although the infrastructure here is relatively advanced and the water supply coverage is over 60 percent, higher than the national average, communities without water supply systems remain in the province outside the Colombo district. Inhabitants of these rural villages still carry water in gallons from one place to another, often travelling many miles.

ABB was involved in the development of a new treatment plant and pumping station for water, supplying drinking water to the high-level reservoir close to Horana. We supplied the entire electrical, instrumentation and control equipment, plus the SCADA for the pumping stations and the treatment plant. As a result, 65,000 m3 of drinking water a day is now treated and delivered to the populous. This has been followed by the second stage of extension, delivering the same amount of water again, so that the total output will stand at 130,000 m3/day.

Enabling rural economies to survive

In India, ABB deployed five of its highest-capacity motors – each capable of pumping 23,000 litres of water per second – as part of the Mahatma Gandhi Kalwakurthy Lift Irrigation Scheme.

Years of severe drought created a water crisis in the Mahbubnagar region in Telangana, a state in southern India where half the population of 35 million depends on agriculture to earn a living. The water table had depleted and the monsoon rains only lasted three to four months a year. The only option for providing adequate water for farming and drinking was to pump it from the Krishna River to a reservoir nearly 300 meters above. From there, through a gravity-driven “lift irrigation” system, the water could be channelled through a hundred kilometers of canals to the parched farms and more than 300 villages that were at risk.

That 12-year-long project was completed in 2018. Now, the villages have a dependable supply of drinking water and crucially with the canals and a network of storage tanks irrigating about 137,000 hectares of land (an area nearly as large as Los Angeles, U.S.A.), farmers are cultivating the soil once again.

Working together to succeed

At ABB we help water companies, municipalities and countries achieve their own targets for SDG 6 through our solutions for, and process expertise in, delivering integrated automation and electrical systems for the water world.

In many parts of the world, where water is scarce due to drought, desertification or rapid urbanisation, we have developed solutions to ensure the reliable and cost-effective production of potable water from desalinated seawater. We also have expertise in flood protection and smart sewerage solutions that prevent wastewater from becoming a sanitation problem during floods and downpours.

From water intake and treatment, to transmission, distribution and reintroduction we have developed sophisticated processes and instrumentation for optimizing water quality control and lifecycle services. We have solutions to detect, within meters, a leak occurring in a water transmission pipe hundreds-of-kilometres long, and control solutions that recognize when water quality is deviating from pre-set parameters, alerting operators automatically to take care of the problem.

Underpinning all this we have ABB Ability?, our suite of digital solutions, which is the glue to connect different systems and diverse operations through the advanced analysis of data. Data that helps operators run their facilities better, identifies potential failings or threats and critically can provide the knowledge required to enable the first steps to collaboration, between different stakeholders.

We are committed to drive technology and business model innovation in this sector and consider ourselves a key partner to support the sustainability of the water lifecycle. We have the competence, the products and the service offerings to manage this and help drive towards the goals of clean and safe water solutions for everyone on this planet.