On March 30, President Emmanuel Macron presented the Water Plan, announcing his desire to work with local authorities “to make smart meters widespread, starting of course with the biggest water users.”
Julien Bellynck, Managing Director of EFICIA, a French expert in energy management for tertiary buildings and local authorities, explains that “this work will generate savings if and only if a decree is published to make water consumption data ‘available to any designated third party in an open standard, easily reusable and exploitable by an automated processing system, as is the case for electricity and gas’.”
Indeed, while network operators read data from remotely-readable meters and send invoices to the nearest cubic meter consumed, they do not share this data with companies in the ecosystem, as they have no legal obligation to make this data accessible to independent third parties. In other words, this data is only used for billing purposes, not to save money.
Julien Bellynck continues, “We know today, thanks to the Observatoire des données d’eau et d’assainissement (SISPEA), that around 20% to 25% of the water transported by the urban network is lost through leaks. Installing new smart, communicating meters will not solve this problem. On the contrary, sharing consumption data could provide a concrete solution to the water challenge. This would enable players like us to create an API to monitor consumption and identify incidents leading to leakage or overconsumption, as we do for electricity and gas.“
EFICIA is therefore campaigning within Frenchtech for this data to be opened up. The expert is also planning to add water supervision to its services, but this remains conditional on access to the data. EFICIA could then send alerts in the event of overconsumption or leaks, and help companies and local authorities monitor and reduce their water consumption.
EFICIA is also planning to add water monitoring to its 100% free application for monitoring and analyzing consumption, currently dedicated to electricity and gas, and accessible to all: individuals, businesses and local authorities.
