Smart Metering, Water Pricing and Social Media to Stimulate Residential Water Efficiency: Opportunities for the SmartH2O Project

Abstract The SmartH2O project aims to provide water utilities, municipalities and citizens with an ICT enabled platform to design, develop and implement better water management policies using innovative metering, social media and pricing mechanisms. This project has as a working hypothesis that high data quality obtained from smart meters and communicable through social media and other forms of interaction could be used to design and implement innovative and effective water pricing policies. Planned case studies in the UK and Switzerland are introduced. We anticipate that SmartH20 research outcomes will be of use to those interested in linking smart metering, social media and smart pricing approaches to achieve more sustainable water management outcomes

Assessment of smart-meter-enabled dynamic pricing at utility and river basin scale

The advent of smart metering is set to revolutionize many aspects of the relationship between water utilities and their customers, and this includes the possibility of using time-varying water prices as a demand management strategy. These dynamic tariffs could promote water use efficiency by reflecting the variations of water demand, availability, and delivery costs over time. This paper relates the potential benefits of dynamic water tariffs, at the utility and basin scale, to their design across a range of timescales. On one end of the spectrum, subdaily peak pricing shifts use away from peak hours to lower a utility’s operational and capital expenses. On the other end, scarcity pricing factors in the variations of the marginal opportunity cost of water at weekly or longer timescales in the river basin from which water is withdrawn. Dynamic pricing schemes that act across timescales can be devised to yield both types of benefits. The analysis estimates these benefits separately for Greater London (United Kingdom) and its 15 million inhabitants. Scarcity pricing implemented on a weekly timescale equates the marginal cost of residential water with estimates of the marginal economic values of environmental-recreational flows derived from tourism, property values, etc. Scarcity pricing during droughts could result in a 22–63% average reduction in environmental flow shortage while residential price increases would be capped at 150% of base levels. Yet, its ability to protect environmental flows could decrease in extreme shortage situations. The net present value of savings from peak pricing is conservatively evaluated at approximately £10 million for each initial percentage point in daily peak-hour price increase

Effects of initial aquifer conditions on economic benefits from groundwater conservation

Worldwide, there is growing recognition of the need to reduce agricultural groundwater use in response to rapid rates of aquifer depletion. To date, however, few studies have evaluated how benefits of conservation vary along an aquifer's depletion pathway. To address this question, we develop an integrated modeling framework that couples an agro-economic model of farmers' field-level irrigation decision-making with a borehole-scale groundwater flow model. Unique to this framework is the explicit consideration of the dynamic reductions in well yields that occur as an aquifer is depleted, and how these changes in intraseasonal groundwater supply affect farmers' ability to manage production risks caused by climate variability and, in particular, drought. For an illustrative case study in the High Plains region of the United States, we apply our model to analyze the value of groundwater conservation activities for different initial aquifer conditions. Our results demonstrate that there is a range of initial conditions for which reducing pumping will have long-term economic benefits for farmers by slowing reductions in well yields and prolonging the usable lifetime of an aquifer for high-value irrigated agriculture. In contrast, restrictions on pumping that are applied too early or too late will provide limited welfare benefits. We suggest, therefore, that there are ‘windows of opportunity’ to implement groundwater conservation, which will depend on complex feedbacks between local hydrology, climate, crop growth, and economics

The Fukushima Daiichi Accident

The Fukushima Daiichi Accident consists of a Report by the IAEA Director General and five technical volumes. It is the result of an extensive international collaborative effort involving five working groups with about 180 experts from 42 Member States with and without nuclear power programmes and several international bodies. It provides a description of the accident and its causes, evolution and consequences, based on the evaluation of data and information from a large number of sources available at the time of writing. The set contains six printed parts and five supplementary CD-ROMs. Contents: Report by the Director General; Technical Volume 1/5, Description and Context of the Accident; Technical Volume 2/5, Safety Assessment; Technical Volume 3/5, Emergency Preparedness and Response; Technical Volume 4/5, Radiological Consequences; Technical Volume 5/5, Post-accident Recovery; Annexes. The JRC contributed to volumes 1,2 and 3, which are attached.JRC.F.5-Nuclear Reactor Safety Assessmen