Greening Infrastructure: What does it take? (Clean Tech Group LLC) - January 18, 2010

Veolia's Marie-Anne Brodschii explores why the world cannot afford a business-as-usual approach to managing electric, water and transportation systems.

Four million inhabitants of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, have access to drinking water only four hours a day, but in five years will have reliable, high quality water around the clock.

What do they have in common with Singaporean high-tech manufacturing plants that get their ultra-pure water from recycled sources? What does Mumbai’s first metro line share with a multimodal integration of trains, buses, transportation on demand, and taxis in the Limburg Province in the Netherlands?

And what could be the connecting thread between PannonPower, operator of Europe’s largest biomass energy plant in Pécs, Hungary, and the flagship Materials Recovery Facility at Gillmoss, Liverpool?

They all relate to infrastructure—either upgrading infrastructure in developed countries or creating new infrastructure in emerging countries. These vital changes to infrastructure are happening in a complex environment that includes the global economic crisis, fight against climate change, spiraling urbanization, natural resource scarcity, and public health issues.

Historically, elements of infrastructure have been managed without regard to how these elements relate to the overall local system or to their often global impacts. The financial, social and environmental crises have made the need to be as efficient as possible with our financial and natural resources readily apparent.

We cannot afford a business-as-usual approach to managing the world’s infrastructure.

How can we take advantage of these crises to reset our approach to infrastructure? Perhaps the next 10 years of this brand-new decade are the real start of green and smart infrastructure—the infrastructure that allows human beings to live decently with access to clean water (nearly one person in six worldwide has no access to clean water according to the World Bank), sewage treatment (just 10 percent of cities worldwide have wastewater treatment facilities), electric power, waste collection, easy mobility, clean air, and green spaces.

Modernizing worldwide water, electric and transportation systems will cost $41 trillion, according to Booz Allen Hamilton. The market size is appealing:

To seize this opportunity, a key element is to start with a holistic view of the situation: Each piece of infrastructure is connected to the other.

Smart grid could be a reality as long as it connects to intelligent buildings. Pushing hard to develop electric vehicles is a great idea, but how is the electricity produced and do EVs solve the congestion issue in cities? Green energy should go hand-in-hand with energy efficiency programs to deploy its full carbon reduction potential. What happens to the dirty waste and contaminated water that comes from creating the inputs for “clean” technology?

To create this holistic view, the following principles should be followed:

1. Model infrastructures as complex systems. You need to select the best, most appropriate technologies to develop or upgrade your infrastructure, and you need to maintain and operate them using a systems mindset in order to deliver a final service to your client. To do so, you need people, technology and creative intelligence along with financing. Measuring, monitoring, and communicating the efficiency of your infrastructure in delivering the proper quantity and quality of water/energy/waste recovery/mobility systems, are key to making it all work. The concept of digital infrastructure can bring new efficiency and transparency to these complex systems.
2. Take into account the unique differences of each infrastructure. Infrastructures are also complicated because each existing one has its own requirements and has been operated fairly differently from one place to another, even in the same country. Delivering water, heat, cooling water, or steam requires designing a tailor-made approach for each client while leveraging data of thousands of assets operated over years, not available on shelves to market newcomers. To illustrate this diversity, consider that the USA counts approximately 155,000 public water systems. France has more than 17,000 wastewater treatment plants.
3. Consider the entire life cycle of infrastructure services. From tapping natural sources of water to restoring it to nature, from production of energy to energy use and recovery, from waste collection to waste recovery, all of these flows need to be considered in their full cycles to optimize economic, social, and environmental goals. This also means the infrastructures themselves require life cycle assessments. Without this lifecycle approach, countries including India will not have enough water to meet their needs in 2050, according to the World Bank.
4. Change customer behavior. Efficiency is not only the concern of the large business and government stakeholders, but also of final consumers and all of us as citizens. Variable billing according to the amount of waste produced can be an efficient incentive for final customers for instance.

Human creativity and innovation could solve these issues more quickly than we think.

To address this complexity in a timeframe compatible to what Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists highly recommend, we will probably have no other choice than to put together the expertise of all cleantech stakeholders, supported by a political will from authorities to solve the issues.

Four families of competences need to be mobilized:

• Design and engineering
• Technology (including large scale information and communication technologies, i.e. ICT)
• Service, and
• Finance

Making these complex systems green requires combining the strengths of innovative startups and mature technology-and-service companies. An example of this collaboration is how NanoH2O is working with Veolia to enhance the efficiency of water desalination.

The consequences of not addressing the issues as systemic ones and not putting together the expertise to address them on a global scale include wasted time and money, global climate change, lost opportunities around failing to meet growing market demand (in locations like China and India), and increased impact on human health.

In meeting these major challenges, there are exciting business opportunities. But we should not underestimate that success, from a business and society standpoint, depends on our capacity to reconsider the way we work together as cleantech stakeholders. Innovation platforms, life cycle assessment, modeling, and smart digital infrastructures must be coupled with human know-how to operate and optimize processes.

Innovation will lead us out of the current crises if we examine life as did Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter, who saw the innovation of the entrepreneur as the only way to break out of stagnant cycles and create new growth opportunities.