The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently proposed significant changes to the Lead and Copper Rule to address the health risks posed by lead in drinking water. The proposed rule would require water systems across the country to replace millions of lead service lines within the next decade. This comes on the heels of a broader effort under the Biden-Harris administration to eliminate 100% of lead pipes in the United States.
Grappling with aging infrastructure, a chronic skills shortage and a growing population, U.S. water utilities are currently facing a significant challenge. It also comes at a time when the water sector’s performance will be exposed to increasing scrutiny with utilities now required to report on everything from infrastructure performance to cybersecurity threats. While major improvements are currently underway, efforts to repair, upgrade or expand water networks are being hampered by a wave of industry retirements that could see vital engineering skills lost forever.
Addressing the threat of lead pipes and aging and leaky pipelines will require a major overhaul of national infrastructure to help ensure clean, plentiful and affordable drinking water across the U.S. and to protect and preserve public health and the environment from lead exposure. The effort is supported by a historic investment of $55 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (also known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act), allocated to enhance the nation’s drinking water, wastewater and stormwater system. The investment includes $15 billion dedicated specifically for lead service line replacement, signifying positive movement toward improving an aging system which is indisputably critical to public health and economic prosperity.
Achieving the necessary transformation with tight budget limits and timelines will require streamlined construction while delivering efficiency savings across entire project life cycles. Executive orders on water upgrades also require enhanced coordination among all water stakeholders. This calls for more collaborative project management software with the capacity to share data between stakeholders across the ecosystem such as supply chains, local contractors, procurement managers and project owners.
New regulations and reporting requirements also create a renewed imperative for technologies such as connected data platforms to bring greater transparency to water infrastructure performance. And the loss of critical technical skill sets to mass retirement will require new technologies to form a bridge of data transferring vital knowledge across generations.
Yet, U.S. water utilities have been slow to invest in digital technology and have focused on short-term, fragmented upgrades to network monitoring and control rather than implementing a network-wide digital transformation. Addressing the current string of circumstances, from demands for accelerated infrastructure development to a spiraling skills shortage, will require a major transformation in sector-wide digital modernization.
Bridging the Skills Gap With Data
The U.S. water workforce is approaching a retirement cliff edge, with one-third of the water utility workforce to be eligible for retirement within the next 10 years and a growing shortage of new workers to replace them. This not only creates a talent shortage but could also cause the permanent loss of valuable experience and insights from previous projects, further hampering the necessary updates to national infrastructure. Connected data platforms will enable water companies to collate, curate and integrate insights from previous projects into future projects, allowing lessons from past projects to improve future projects and project insights. Smart data analytics enables companies to collect critical data from previous projects and connect it to other relevant data points throughout the project life cycle.
Smart data allows companies to institutionalize individual insights and learnings so data collected from sensors or engineers becomes organizational knowledge, collectively improving the performance of all future partners, projects and suppliers. This could also form an intergenerational bridge of data, transferring knowledge from past workforces to upskill future workers as a framework for best practices or sharing insights across sectors. Ultimately, this could create an economy of data where past project knowledge is continually recycled into future projects, enabling water infrastructure development to become progressively faster and more cost efficient. This could help avoid the current skills gap and enable faster onboarding of new workers.
Increased Reporting Requirements
Utilities are facing increased regulations from the new lead and copper rules to tightening of wastewater discharge regulations. This will likely spur a threefold increase in private capital investment to dramatically improve the transparency and resilience of water infrastructure in line with regulatory demands. This will necessitate the introduction of tools and technologies to allow all marketplace stakeholders to monitor and manage assets across end-to-end project life cycles.
Technologies enable real-time oversight across project life cycles with existing tech stacks while other tools enable the live identification and tracking of all project materials and equipment across multiple sites and supply chains. If implemented correctly, this will bring unprecedented transparency and improvements to new water infrastructure and enable near
real-time reporting.
Maximizing Critical Investment
The EPA’s proposed rule to replace lead pipes will play a crucial role in removing lead from U.S. water infrastructure. The rule mandates the removal and replacement of all lead service lines within a 10-year time frame—a significant shift from previous guidelines which were more permissive and allowed utilities to implement partial replacements or other interim measures.
The $15 billion allocated by the bill will likely not cover the large investment needed to replace lead service lines in U.S. water infrastructure. Addressing this will require digitalization of new infrastructure projects to predict and control project costs and create efficiency savings. The first step is for water utilities to control costs and prevent budget overruns for new capital infrastructure projects and upgrades. New digital tools now enable greater project certainty through more realistic budgets and schedules that are properly adjusted for risk, while automated earned value management (EVM) metrics will allow project stakeholders to accurately track project progress against planned cost and timelines in real-time. The overarching benefit of these new integrated project controls solutions is faster and more collaborative planning—putting project teams in a position to plan and react more swiftly to challenges as they arise.
Unification of infrastructure data across multiple projects will also enable knowledge from past projects to drive cost efficiencies in new capital investments. Real-time connected data will allow greater oversight and control of costs across project life cycles. With the need to overhaul national water grids within tight budget limits, there is no better time for the industry to start collecting crucial data points, which will allow companies to make projects more efficient, reduce costs and improve projections. Connecting data from back office to job site and across project life cycles could also help utilities meet the demands of recent executive orders for greater coordination and integration across all water stakeholders.
Looking Ahead
Achieving the removal and replacement of all lead service lines within a 10-year time frame is critical to public health. U.S. utilities have an opportunity to harness the benefits of technology to retain vital knowledge and bring greater transparency and efficiency, which could in turn accelerate capital infrastructure investments. Adopting an integrated project controls platform can allow for knowledge and skills to be transferred across projects to create a virtuous circle of smarter construction. Connecting and consolidating all data through a single project management platform can deliver efficiencies, improve network resilience, reduce costs and drive greater transparency. Connected data will also help foster cross-sector coordination and collaboration across multiple organizations. This would ensure new infrastructure can be planned, monitored and maintained to meet growing demand while protecting water resources and public health from ever-growing challenges.