Last week, for the first time in 75 years, officials from California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR) conducting their annual snow survey found absolutely nothing to measure at the 6,800-foot survey site in the Sierra Nevada. Standing on grass, which would be buried under 5 feet of snow during a typical year, California Governor Jerry Brown took an unprecedented step, directing the DWR to work with the state’s 400 local water supply agencies to reduce water usage by 25 percent.
While 80 percent of water consumed in California is used for agriculture, in urban centers there and across the country, 58 percent of water is used for landscaping and irrigation, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. As far as conservation goes, that expenditure represents a major opportunity for savings—not just in water, but also energy. In California, 19 percent of the total energy expenditure goes toward cleaning and transporting water.
A partnership, announced last week, between IBM and The Weather Channel‘s business-to-business arm, Weather Services International (WSI), highlights the value that weather data holds for businesses of all types. IBM and WSI are developing tools for anticipating major weather events and then leveraging the Internet of Things and data analytics to mitigate the estimated $500 billion in weather-related losses that businesses suffer annually. But weather data can also be utilized to improve how companies use and manage water resources—and not only when severe drought forces them to take drastic measures to conserve.
“In 2002, when we founded the company, we could see water would become a big issue and that data was pretty sparse, in terms of the meaningful data needed to make decisions on how to use water,” says Christopher Spain, the CEO of California-based HydroPoint, which sells the WeatherTrak platform. Through a combination of irrigation controllers, sensors, weather stations, and cloud-based applications and services, WeatherTrak automates and optimizes irrigation schedules based on a range of factors, from plant species, soil type and topography to the estimated rate of evaporation and weather forecasts.
Most businesses view water as an abundant resource, Spain says. “When you have abundance, you end up with systemic waste,” he states. “If it’s not scarce, why would I care? That kind of thinking is just in our bones.”
But throughout the years, HydroPoint has been able to show businesses that they could save money by conserving water. Customers—which include Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, Lockheed Martin‘s three Silicon Valley campuses, and a number of housing developments and the city of Santa Clarita, California—generally see a payback in their investment within two years, Spain reports. Some customers, who have deployed the HydroPoint system across multiple properties, have saved up to 10 billion gallons of water within a single year, he notes.
According to Spain, payback time is closely related to scalability and size. A Walmart store that only needs to irrigate one acre could achieve a return in 18 months, he says, whereas a school campus that has much larger acreage and irrigation demands might take longer to see a payback.
WeatherTrak collects more than 8 million data points daily, from more than 40,000 sensors, ranging from weather stations, radar systems and radiosondes (weather balloons that measure pressure, temperature and relative humidity levels at elevations as high as 115,000 feet) to river gauges, ocean buoy stations and instrumentation mounted on aircraft. It then uses a process called the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model—developed by a number of government agencies, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—as the basis for its weather-modeling software. This is then used to generate predictions regarding the rate of evapotranspiration at each site at which HydroPoint irrigation systems are deployed.
Evapotranspiration is the movement of water into the atmosphere from soil and vegetation. Every plant loses water through transpiration at a different rate, so a formula that accounts for current weather factors and a coefficient, specific to the plant or plants being irrigated, determines the soil’s moisture level.
Combining these various sources allows the software to create an irrigation plan for each zone on an end user’s property. Zones are established based on such factors as the type of plants, the amount of sunlight or shade each plant receives, the slope of the ground and its aspect (the direction it faces). The plan is continually updated based on current conditions and weather forecasts.
Additionally, HydroPoint attempts to verify its estimates for evapotranspiration for each irrigation site by tapping into nearby weather-tracking systems that also monitor evapotranspiration levels. In California, for example, it uses data culled from the California Irrigation Management Information System for this comparison. In some cases, in which customers are irrigating landscapes not covered by these local irrigation-tracking systems, HydroPoint installs its own weather stations.
Early attempts to rely on soil-moisture sensors proved unreliable, Spain says, as well as difficult to scale for very large properties. That, he explains, is why the company instead relies on weather data.
To ensure that water is not lost through leaks in the irrigation systems, HydroPoint installs sensors inside the irrigation pipes and irrigation heads to detect leaks, which can create significant waste and costs for end users. If a flow-rate sensor detects the presence of a leak, it automatically shuts off the section of irrigation pipe in which that leak was discovered, and issues an alert to the HydroPoint system via a cellular link.
Based on an end user’s preference, this alert is sent either to an onsite water manager or the third-party landscape-management company that installed and maintains the system.
Irrigation 2.0
In California, the DWR is looking to operators of campuses, golf courses, cemeteries and other large landscapes to make significant cuts in water usage.
Richard Restuccia, who directs water-management solutions for ValleyCrest Landscape Companies, a firm that designs, installs and maintains irrigation systems for these types of water users (and who is also a HydroPoint reseller), says the fundamental approach to managing water must change to enable long-term savings.
“What we’ve seen in the past, in terms of landscape management, is that if something doesn’t look good, add water,” Restuccia states, adding that a lack of water is not necessarily the core reason for poor plant health. “Often, the [company] taking care of a landscape has not had to pay for the water, and the costs [of overwatering] to the owner weren’t very high, either. So no one cared.” But that, he says, is changing.
“In Los Angeles, water pricing has increased over the past few years,” Restuccia says, “and now it can cost as much as $16,000 a year to water an acre of turf,” depending on how efficient or inefficient the irrigation system is.
Overwatering—and, therefore, producing runoff water that is not absorbed by the landscape—also leads to other environmental harms, Spain adds. “If you over-irrigate,” he explains, “you flush more fertilizers into the watershed before they get broken down.” HydroPoint has enabled some end users to reduce runoff by 80 percent, he adds, by irrigating at the right time, and by applying only as much water as is needed.
When ValleyCrest was searching for a smart irrigation system it could resell to its customers, Restuccia says, the company had four important criteria: the application of water based on weather and soil moisture data, Internet-based software enabling the remote management of irrigation controllers, integrated flow sensors with automated shut-off triggers, and analytics reporting that lets end users view their water consumption and savings over a span of time.
The smart irrigation market is no longer in its nascent stages, Restuccia reports. ValleyCrest evaluated 20 different smart irrigation system providers that offer most or some of the criteria he sought. He then whittled the list down to six companies and spent a year evaluating the different solutions.
Both Spain and Restuccia say that business for them in California, as well as in other drought-stricken regions, has been very robust during the past year. Demand spiked last summer, they add, when cities began to feel the effects of the drought and government demands for water conservation grew more intense.
Drought Response at the Local Level
A number of California municipalities have put water restrictions in place that limit ratepayers to watering their landscapes only two days per week. However, Spain says, that type of regulation only leads to waste, since people tend to flood their plants on those days, and because spikes in demand on the water system sometimes cause breaks in the water infrastructure.
Spain thinks cities should instead seek to incentivize customers who use soil sensors or systems based on weather data in order to become vastly more efficient users of water for irrigation. During times of drought, he says, such systems allow landowners to significantly reduce consumption while still keeping the root systems alive. This way, Spain explains, the plants will not need to be replaced and will survive the drought—even if they remain brown for a season or two.
“Water has long been the ugly ducking in terms of resources,” Spain states, “with fuel and electricity getting all the attention from businesses.” If there is a silver lining in the current California drought, he says, it could be that companies will start to employ data to make intelligent decisions about how they use water.