Digitalization and planning, Spain's challenges in water management

Seven of the ten basins with the greatest water stress in the entire European Union are in our country, according to the European Environment Agency. Water stress has become a major issue, and to address it, the way forward is to improve efficiency and sustainability in water management. Efficiency implies having sustained hydrological planning and efficient infrastructure, which incorporates new technologies and is renewed from time to time. Investing in infrastructure ensures service continuity, with lower operation and maintenance costs.

Planning and strategy

The planning and strategy of the administrations must be accompanied by the efforts of the operators who manage the water service. Specialized companies can provide technology, innovation capacity and investment to offer concrete solutions. In the specific case of Aqualia, digitalization, which has become one of the company's strategic lines, is vital to advance in efficient and sustainable water management. So much so that in 2023 alone, its investment in digital transformation was 17 million euros.

Increasing the performance of the networks, detecting anomalous consumption in real time and reducing water losses due to leaks or notifying when no consumption is accounted for in homes inhabited by elderly people, are some of the new features that are already enjoyed thanks to the new technologies. One of the examples is located in the city of Almería, where Aqualia has managed the service since 1993, a period in which its population has grown by 23%, to 198,000 inhabitants. However, water consumption has been reduced by 47%, going from 30 hm3 in 1993 to 16 hm3 in 2020. In that period, investments in the city's water service have totaled nearly 85 million euros.

Thanks to the implementation of projects for the early detection of leaks in the networks, unnecessary water losses and damage to the systems are avoided, something applicable to municipalities of any type. In cities like Talavera de la Reina (Toledo), the digitalization of the water service, started in 2010, has managed to improve the efficiency of the network by 20 percentage points, which represents an approximate saving of 1.8 million m3 per year , an amount of water that would fit in 720 Olympic swimming pools. Also municipalities with less than 5,000 inhabitants, such as Villasequilla (Toledo), already have 100% remote reading meters. In the Region of Murcia, the improvement of infrastructure has achieved an average improvement in the performance of the supply networks of 7.5 percentage points in the municipalities where Aqualia manages the concession, which, during the year 2022 alone, allowed savings of more than 2.5 million cubic meters of water.

Data and analytics tools and technologies continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace and their analytical capabilities are invaluable to the water sector. One of the latest efforts in this regard is the recent alliance of Aqualia and Vodafone to digitalize the water sector in Spain. Both companies have closed a five-year agreement that will allow one million water meters to be digitized in our country. Another success story is the pilot project that Aqualia has carried out together with SDG Group, a consulting company specialized in Data, Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, based on advanced analytics to prevent water leaks. The towns of Talavera de la Reina (Toledo) or Dénia (Alicante) have been the first pilot municipalities to adopt this initiative, thanks to which hydraulic performance is being improved by between 5% and 8%.

Along with digitalization and, to address the challenge of drought, it is also necessary to promote the use of alternative resources, such as the use of regenerated water and desalination, which can become strategic, especially in areas of water stress. In this sense, Aqualia develops lines of research aimed at the reuse and use of regenerated water for the recovery of ecosystems or the transformation of effluents into water suitable for irrigation, among others.

Water is capable of generating a positive cascade effect. Working on water, crossing borders and sectors, will accelerate progress on all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For Aqualia, the first company in the sector certified by AENOR in achieving the SDGs, water is essential for development. Companies like Aqualia are integrating the SDGs into the center of their business strategy to promote global change promoted by the United Nations and thus generate solutions, measures and concrete facts.