The Critical Issue of Water Infrastructure Resiliency

California has been in a state of drought for the last four years, but many observers have been noting that California has not been handling the situation as well as it could.

Some consider California’s water laws to be irrational and hard to maneuver for a start, and others consider it’s water consumers to be even more irrational.

In California, 90% of the state’s water is dedicated to agriculture and a lot of that agriculture is focused on water-heavy crops like cotton and alfalfa, which seems odd considering that California has a lot of desert areas.

Another problem is that California’s primary source of water is winter snow.

The Energy Collective passionately reports:

“There’s a real lack of resiliency in the current water infrastructure that also impacts energy. There are more available solutions to address hydropower reductions than potable water reductions. The electricity infrastructure is more amenable to optimization through ongoing applications of innovative technologies, policies, and financial capital. More distributed generation plus energy storage can replace some hydropower reductions. But as far as water infrastructure goes, these systems are much more inflexible and much less optimized than their electric grid counterparts. It’s just the early days for deployment of Smart Grid technologies into water infrastructure in California and much of the rest of the USA. But more than that, we’ll need smart water policies and innovations in financing the necessary water infrastructure upgrades to address critical resiliency concerns.”

The issue of resiliency is not unique to California, but it seems that critical infrastructure asset management needs to be applied in this case and others.

Inframanage.com observes that the availability of water for municipal, utility, agriculture, industry and other competing uses is a worldwide problem, that is growing worse with rapidly increasing urbanization.

Infrastructure management future demand planning is the place to address water availability in your infrastructure management practice.

Often, due to the competing demands for water, and complex mixes of legislation, permits, and licenses water demand planning needs to consider very long forward periods – 50 years or more.