In the News

There is good news though. The other side of challenge is opportunity, and assuming enough recognition of the potential upside, there is the possibility of change. Awareness and action on water issues is clearly gathering momentum – in Canada as well as around the world – as evidenced by the quality of discussion and range of industry innovation on display at the Ontario H20 Global Water Leadership Summit, a gathering of water experts from 14 countries, attended by 300 stakeholders in Toronto last month. In his opening address to the Summit, Glen Murray, Ontario’s Minister of Research and Innovation, described the transformation of our productive processes that is enabling change: noting estimates that outline the magnitude of global water problems – “one in three people in the next 20 years will not have enough water to drink” – Murray also explained that “today we live in an innovation-based economy in which ideas and capital and talent drive wealth creation. In fact, it’s the relationship between innovation and product that ... drives higher productivity, and our ability to adapt new technologies and new processes that are necessary to create an economy based on value.”

Innovation was very much the watch word at the Water Summit in many other presentations, including an opening panel made up of specialists from the EPA, Singapore’s Economic Development Board, WATEC Israel and the Netherlands Water Partnership, sampled here in video format.

In his presentation, president and CEO of the Cleantech Group, Sheeraz Haji deconstructed innovation to sketch out three categories of opportunity. The first new area of interest Haji called “water from energy” – or what to do with “produced water” that is a typical byproduct of extraction of hard to reach natural gas and oil resources. This field can involve use of a membrane for desalination, though Haji also pointed to reverse osmosis as a disruptive technology with great potential that may take slightly longer come to market. According to Haji, “this world of treatment is huge,” and in addition to industrial, there are municipal, consumer and agricultural applications. “Smart Water” is a second category that Haji identified as a measuring, monitoring and management opportunity where data will be used to understand “water footprint.” As these solutions are “premise-based technologies” aimed at improving operational and distribution efficiencies, they are likely to be highly differentiated according to the implementation situation, and dependent on network optimization.  And a final opportunity, Haji explained, involves harvesting various elements, such as energy, fertilizer and water, from high organic content or wastewater. According to Haji, for the Cleantech Group, this activity is a “no brainer” as with new models, wastewater treatment can generate revenue – is essentially free, unlike treatment in old systems which generally represented cost. Ultimately, Haji’s “critical key for success in this market” is working with large companies, such as Veolia, that are investing in water innovation and can help start-ups get to market really quickly.

Beyond high level discussion of opportunity in water markets, the Summit also offered concrete examples of what Laura Schenkar, principal at The Artemis Project consultancy, called “practical, market driven solutions that are providing leadership.” In an annual global competition that Schenkar explained is designed to “recognize innovation that matters,” the Artemis group announced over the course of the two-day summit, the top 50 water entrepreneurs that are “applying technology to meet the world’s water challenges.” Winners of the competition faced stiff competition – Ontario alone has 900 water companies, many of which did not appear on the final Artemis roster but nevertheless serve as growing testament to the importance of the water industry.

Case in point is R&D Innovative Solutions Inc.’s Innosol instrumentation, a microbiological contamination detection, or the portable water purification system, developed by Dr. Gene Rabinski to create potable water to address emergency situations onsite. The value of Rabinski’s non-chemical solution is that while the system is able to filter out toxins, helpful minerals are not removed from the water. Beyond economics, the potential social, industrial or security benefits of this technology are considerable: as Gordon Stille of Stillewater Solutions explains, at present there are approximately 117 Aboriginal communities on a boil water alert, and the system could be used to guard against biowater terrorism, or to treat industrial contaminants such as mining pond tailings.

Canada fared well in the Artemis competition (results list available here), winning 7 awards overall (four Ontario companies) from a pool of over 200 applicants, results that were on par with Israel, a country that has historically demonstrated water innovation out of necessity: water scarcity in the Middle East is viewed by many commentators as a major source in international tension in the region. A good illustration of Israeli water innovation on display at the Summit is TaKaDu Ltd., Artemis winner and three-year-old provider of a SaaS water monitoring solution for utilities which aims to recover the 25-30% of water that is lost through leaks in distribution networks. The TaKaDu solution utilizes extensive sensoring in utilities networks, subjecting water, operational and GIS data collected by SCADA and other systems to extensive algorithmic analysis to identify deviations from the norm that can offer real-time insight on leaks, bursts, DMA breaches and other network inefficiencies.

Not surprisingly, TaKaDu CEO Amir Peleg’s background is in software and the telecom space. His intent in founding the company was to apply “some IT, mathematics and computer science – things that I know – to problems of water loss in Israeli utilities.” According to Peleg, the TaKaDu solution is not unlike the transformation that took place earlier in IT or telecom: how do you create a monitoring layer on top of a network, how do you understand what’s going on in the network based on data events – applying statistical analysis to the data – and how do you use the knowledge created through analysis to engage in planning? TaKaDu’s value proposition lies in the range of algorithms that are applied to data, and to the variety of data that can be analyzed – because data is standardized on digital protocols, there is virtually no integration and no issue with digital delivery.

TaKaDu’s solution is cloud-based, using Amazon servers around the world – despite recent breeches – as the infrastructure foundation for its services delivery, and charging customers based on the size of their network (dollars/km or mile).  A simple solution with quick ROI that Peleg explains can help utilities save water, reduce insurance premiums or regulator fines, TaKaDu’s cloud model offers additional benefit through lower CAPEX. In Peleg’s view, the biggest issue lies in the utility infrastructure: “this is one of the drawbacks of the Canadian and U.S. markets. Most people here don’t have enough meters, or SCADA.” But for TaKaDu, this challenge is not insurmountable given growing worldwide market demand – as Peleg explained in a Summit interview, faced with infrastructure shortfall, TaKaDu can just simply “go to another country. [Since it’s cloud-based] My product or service could bring value to any utility worldwide.”