Wim's Water Wisdom - March 2025

The slow water industry: moving faster than ever

[Wim’s Water Wisdom - AM-Team's monthly opinion piece - April 2025]

An often-heard narrative is that the water industry is a slowly moving industry. Underlying factors included the long infrastructure lifetimes (influencing the speed of ‘evolution’), the relatively low monetary value of water and associated budgets, and the risk-averseness inherent to operating critical infrastructure.    

However, never before has the speed of change been this high. On one hand, caused by a rapid increase of emerging challenges, and on the other hand, caused by opportunities from emerging technology. Key challenges include climate change mitigation and adaptation, new regulation, an ageing workforce, the need for future-proof and faster decision-making, and population dynamics.    

15 years ago, while I was conducting my PhD work, people were talking about climate change, but action in terms of mitigation and adaptation was in its infancy. Today, utilities are investing in both, and I’d expect the (adaptation) budgets to grow exponentially in the coming decades. People were still developing methods to detect and quantify emerging contaminants, and my brother was conducting research on the impact of PFAS on the reproduction of dragonflies. Today, emerging contaminants can be found in European regulation and reuse regulation elsewhere, and PFAS is emerging as a key challenge that can potentially disrupt how we think about treatment and water-fit-for-purpose. Finally, potable and non-potable reuse is growing exponentially, and also in Europe, I’d expect potable reuse to become a hot topic.    

Let’s now take a look at the emerging technology side. When we started AM-Team in 2017, ‘modelling’ and ‘digital twins’ were not at all common terminology. It was even risky as a business to talk about it too much, as it would cause a disconnect with the market. Today, ‘digital’ is on the strategic agenda of many companies, and utilities are releasing market requests that include or exclusively focus on digital twin development and implementation. To the best of our knowledge, the latter is a trend of the last 1.5 to 2 years (with some exceptions of course).    

It is not a coincidence. This emerging quest for digital water is not hype-driven but needs-driven, which makes it especially interesting. Decisions have become more complex while they need to be taken faster. The complexity is especially in a) being future-proof in a dynamic world while b) considering more criteria in decision making (e.g. carbon footprint next to costs and water quality). This is where the emerging technology offers an unprecedented business case.    

Here’s an overview figure I often use in talks. It brings connects challenges with technological opportunities in digital.    

These are the 5 big business case areas we expect to manifest in the next 10 years:

1. Smart and proactive operation: real-time and offline digital twins that provide continuous multi-criteria optimisation of treatment assets. Operations staff will have some new tools in their hands.
2. Faster and efficient training: the use of virtual environments (shouldn’t be fancy VR all the time…) to accelerate the training of staff and disseminate the knowledge of experienced staff.
3. Better documentation and communication: many water companies are big organisations. In line with the above challenges, new ways of collaboration will be needed. We expect digital twins to be used across different domains, with interfaces changing according to who’s looking.
4. Informed and fast decision making: we expect short-term planning to be made more efficient and better informed with the use of new tools.
5. Preparing for change: we also expect the long-term (remember: future-proof) decision-making to be enhanced significantly by those same tools. ‘What-if’ testing, and having continuous access to this functionality, will become of key importance.

Important note: the tools / models used in the above 5 items can be largely the same… it’s just the use cases that differ. We expect end users to become more digitally enabled and to build digital assets themselves. Just because it will become super important and part of their core business. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is prone to becoming a great new thing. And talking about speed? Digital assets will evolve much faster compared to the real ones.    

Digital water regards,    

Wim.    

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Wim's Water Wisdom is a monthly op-ed from Dr. Wim Audenaert, CEO & Co-founder of AM Team shedding light on today's and tomorrow's challenges, opportunities and trends in the water industry. This month's piece invites for a balanced approach to digitalisation in water and wastewater treatment.    

AM-Team delivers modeling and data services and digital twin solutions for water utilities, industrial users, engineering firms, and technology providers. We tackle planning, design, operational and digitalisation challenges by combining deep process and industry knowledge with modeling and digital expertise—ensuring models and digital twins that create real value.    

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