Say you caught an elevator ride with the President -- you've got 45 seconds to say something. What would it be?
I'd talk about water.
Aging water infrastructure wastes billions of liters of drinking water, every day.
But doing nothing is betting human lives on a losing hand.
I'd offer the President a moderate alternative: make water infrastructure smarter.
The relatively small investment would pay for itself. Utilities could visualize weaknesses in infrastructure, enabling them to prioritize repairs instead of blindly replacing good pipe along with the bad. They would predict failures and plan intelligently, scheduling infrastructure upgrades and distributing costs over a period of years, thus increasing the affordability of each phase.
Smart water monitoring would continue to benefit new infrastructure: sensors would analyze water quality in real time. Utilities would identify toxins immediately, without the long feedback loops inherent in traditional laboratory testing. They'd be able to preempt bacterial outbreaks, industrial contamination and terrorist attacks -- saving lives while reducing costs.
It's a win-win opportunity: increase water quality while reducing energy usage and carbon emissions, improve national security and prevent tragedies, add momentum to a growing industry, creating jobs and exportable intellectual property, all while saving utilities billions of dollars now and tens of billions of dollars in the long run.
He'd have to say yes.
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