Water Utilities Face Climate Whiplash & Workforce Challenges

Tallulah Lutkin, can you tell us more about what you do?

Basically, my job is to talk to water utilities all day, find out what they're doing, learn about the challenges they are facing and help discover what the solutions are. I am also host of the Water Leaders Podcast, where we share stories from water utilities across the world.
 

Climate change is a reality. Extreme weather events are more and more common. How are the utility leaders you speak to dealing with these changes?

I think I can say with confidence that climate change is the number one priority on every water utility leader’s mind simply because it has so much of an impact. Whether that's a lack of water, meaning you need to invest to increase your water supply to be resilient to drought, or there is too much water, i.e., flooding and extreme storms. And it’s not the case that half the utilities in the world are attacking drought and the other half tackling floods, most utilities are tackling both at the same time.
One of the first guests on the Water Leaders Podcast, Adele Hashir from California, refers to this as climate whiplash. It’s like when California went through a massive drought for years and years, and then suddenly the rains came. The question is how do you deal with those two things at the same time?
It's really difficult because you need to invest in both of these. You need to convince your regulators, your stakeholders, your customers, and legislators that you need money to invest in both of these things. And if you've just gone through a massive storm, how do you then go to a regulator or legislator and say we need to invest in drought measures? They'll look at you and ask about the massive flooding. Why would we need to invest in more water? Well, we need both of those things. And the reverse is true as well.
 

What do we mean when we talk about a resilient water supply?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think that resilience, at the end of the day, means being prepared. It means having the infrastructure in place before the disasters happen and being ready to deal with them.
There are lots of creative ways that people are investing in in resilience. A great example comes from Porto. It's quite surprising when you think of Portugal, you might think of dryness and droughts, but in Porto they have quite heavy rains and so they're investing in engineering to make the city more permeable. Which means that when rains come, rather than the rain going out to the streets and creating flooding issues, storm water or rainwater is captured in underwater tanks or it is captured with green infrastructure, i.e., capturing rainwater, by infiltrating it into the soil.
I think when we talk about resilience to both drought and floods, the gold standard is also looking at capturing storm water in reservoirs and then being able to use it later; to have a bank of water for times of drought, and that's something they're looking into in Portugal.
California is another really good example of somewhere where they have both of those extremes and they're investing in the type of infrastructure that they need. They have so-called virtual aqueducts. These are not physical aqueducts bringing water in, it's more of a series of lots of different investments in lots of things that will help them be resilient. That includes water recycling as well. When we are talking about a new water source, it's not a new river or a new lake, it's wastewater and turning that into usable or drinkable water for the future.
 

How is customer engagement with the water authorities changing? Is there more pressure from the customer nowadays?

It can be a really thorny topic. Like you say, environmental pressures are pushing more utilities into the spotlight. That's something we've been seeing over the last couple of years. People are suddenly having this awareness of water utilities, and what they do and why they're important. These climate events, whether drought or extreme flooding, lead to the utilities realizing that they need to engage more with their customers. Previously, if nobody heard from their water utility, that was a good thing; no news was good news. Whereas now utilities are realizing that they do need to be proactive, they need to go out there, they need to explain.
Sydney is a fascinating example. Basically, Sydney needs to rework its whole water system. At the moment they have a system where water comes from the mountains, it runs through the city and it goes into the sea. However, that's not resilient to the issues that they will have with climate change and water scarcity. Therefore, their water utility is looking to rework the system so that they can have multiple points of entry. e.g., water recycling, and other solutions.
These changes are obviously going to require massive investment. The water utilities have gone out there, they've spoken to their customers, they've done a whole program asking their customers if they would agree to increasing bills by X amount if that meant more water resilience. Perhaps surprisingly, most customers said yes.  Obviously, bills are a massive issue and people want their water to be affordable, but if you go out there and explain what's possible, then explain the technologies, what's necessary, that it is big infrastructure, etc., people realize that water is actually still pretty cheap considering the amount of investment that needs to go into it.
 

How about in Europe. Are customers facing water tariff increases?

There are a lot of disparities in Europe. There are a lot of different countries with different economic levels. We've just released the GWI Tariff Survey where we surveyed over 600 cities to see how much people pay for water. Something that was really interesting is that both of Eastern and Western Europe saw some of the biggest increases in tariffs or average increase in tariffs that we had seen for a long time. This is partly due to longer term investment into capital infrastructure and that's linked to aging infrastructure. Utilities, especially in Eastern Europe, are realizing that aging infrastructure is having a compounding effect of making flood events worse for the population. And for now, I haven't seen so many stories of people really complaining about that. Maybe this is because people are realizing this investment is really needed.
And Western Europe is the same. For a very long time it has had quite low tariffs. Tariffs would increase, maybe one or two percent every year. So still going up, but not very much compared to North America, where tariffs go up by about 5%. Now it’s the first time in Europe where we're seeing tariffs increase more than in North America. There was a 6% increase in Western Europe this year, so that's really showing that in Europe, water utilities are realizing that they have no choice. They must increase their tariffs because there is so much investment that needs to go into climate resilience and aging infrastructure and operational expenses as well.

Image source: https://www.globalwaterintel.com

Is the full Water Tariff Survey, or a summary of it, available from GWI?  

Yes. You can download a sample which will give a two-page summary and a few charts. If you like what you see, I recommend subscribing to GWI to get the full report because you'll have the breakdown of all those tariffs that we collect. We break it down by fixed tariffs, variable tariffs, water versus wastewater, storm water tariffs, etc. as well. It really paints that whole picture of how much people pay for water and wastewater.
 

Another possible factor of concern for the water industry concerns the ageing of its workforce. Can you explain more about the so-called ‘silver tsunami’?

I can't remember who coined that phrase, but I've been hearing it a bit recently. Workforce issues are one of the top three priorities of utilities. The silver tsunami is the idea that water utilities are an old industry. We think about ageing infrastructure, but it’s also an ageing workforce. A lot of people who joined the workforce a few decades ago, great engineers, are all coming to the end of their careers. That means a lot of expertise is leaving the water utilities.
So, the question is, how do you keep that expertise within the water industry, but also how do you recruit the next generation and what does that next generation look like? Maybe now we're looking to install new technologies and that runs parallel with the workforce, where the people that you will hire will need to know a bit about IT, and about AI. We will need people who are able to implement these new technologies that are coming on, and that will help utilities be resilient for the future.
I think that it’s a challenge to be attractive to these people. If you work in AI, you could be paid loads of money. However, utilities cannot afford to pay such salaries. But at the same time, I think something that water utilities have, and that Google maybe doesn't have, is this appeal of having a purpose. The generations that are coming want to have a job where they feel they're doing something meaningful, that they're helping. Working in a water utility is something where you're basically working in an environmental job. You're on the front lines of climate change. That's something that water utilities need to show. Play that card of being purposeful with regards to the environment.
 

You were recently at the Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival. Can you tell us about that?

Basically, their concept is to try out as many innovations as possible. That's something that you would expect to see at Google or Facebook, but not at a water utility. They're really trying to find different things that they can do.
For example, they use drones to go and monitor water quality in remote places, for example in Scotland where it wouldn’t be practical to leave a permanent data-recording device.
Another example is related to the silver tsunami we mentioned before. The challenge is to retain the knowledge that the older generation of engineers have. For example, can you use AI chatbots? By recording all the engineer’s knowledge in some documentation, then creating a chat bot based on that documentation that younger engineers can use. They can ask the chatbot questions about how to do things, how to operate things, or a specific question about some different parameters. It’s basically downloading the knowledge of these people who are retiring, so it can be used for the next generation.
 

How are they recovering heat from the wastewater in Germany? Are they using it to heat IKEA?

I love this story so much because it's so easy to understand, but also no one's ever heard of it. What they're doing in Berlin is using the heat from wastewater. If you imagine when you're in your house you're going to have a shower, you're going to wash your clothes, or whatever, and all that heat that you're paying for is just going down the drain. It’s heat from your hot shower, your hot bath, your dishwasher, your washing machine and your bodily functions.
That heat exists, and it's hotter than the air outside. What they're doing in Berlin is recovering heat from that wastewater and using it to heat buildings. You can concentrate that heat and then send it where it needs to go.
In the IKEA case they found that one pocket of heat was close to an IKEA store. So, they decided to use that to heat the store. Now this furniture shop is heated by wastewater, and that means it's not heated with fossil fuels with gas. And that's obviously a massive positive impact on the environment as well. Rather than using fossil fuel, you're using wastewater, which is basically free heat.
In terms of the wastewater utility themselves, it's not really an economic benefit to them. It's probably cheaper for the utility to just lose that heat. But I think it comes back to this idea of having that responsibility and knowing that there are things we can do, and we need to do, because we have that responsibility towards the city and towards customers and towards the planet as well.
 

Can we talk about Ukraine? How are the Ukrainian utilities managing amid the terrible war and bombing in that country?

I'll start off by saying the resilience of the Ukrainian people is absolutely incredible. I encourage everyone, if they listen to one of the episodes from the Water Leaders Podcast, it should be the Ukrainian one. It's very impressive. You can really see that despite all of the challenges that they are facing, they are so resilient, and they are getting up every morning and doing what needs to be done.
The problems that a normal water utility might encounter, the ageing infrastructure, workforce issues, etc. have been compounded by the invasion that's happened. We spoke to a utility in Mykolaiv where a massive water main that was their main supply line had been destroyed. That meant that they had to go and dig a bunch of boreholes around the city so that they could keep providing water.
But it's also the destruction of energy infrastructure. We all know that water utilities depend on energy, it's a very energy intensive process to treat water and wastewater. So, destruction of energy infrastructure also has an impact on the water utility as well.
Additionally, there are issues with the workforce as well. In the West we complain that our engineers are retiring; In Ukraine people are going off to fight. So, as in other wars across history, women are coming in to replace the men who've gone off to fight. There's a huge drive for Ukrainian women to join the water utilities to do those jobs.
Perhaps we can take some lessons from this situation. If we look at the challenges that they have faced and the ways that they have solved the problems and the resilience they are trying to achieve, that's something that we can learn from. Hopefully, we're not going to end up in a situation where we're going to be bombarded. But when you think about climate change, and making our utilities resilient to disaster, whether that's man-made or not, it’s important. Ukraine is finding loads of ways to do that and to continue providing water and wastewater services in a very difficult situation. There's really a lot that we can learn from those Ukrainian utilities.