HERE50 billion reasons to feel optimistic about 2023

The world of water through the eyes of GWI publisher Christopher Gasson.

America has some of the greatest water and sewerage utilities in the world. It also has some of the worst. It is the most polarised water sector in the world. There are 21 US utilities in our Leading Utilities of the World group – more than any other country. But then there are utilities in cities like Flint, MI, and Jackson, MS. It reflects the extraordinary fragmentation of the US utility sector: with 50,000 utilities, there is very little cross-subsidisation from the rich to the poor. Furthermore, the Federal funding system has hitherto been set up to help those who can help themselves. Those utility leaders who are so busy fixing yesterday’s main break don’t have the bandwidth to put together a plan to stop the same thing happening again tomorrow. They find themselves trapped in a cycle of decline. The billions of dollars that the Federal government has poured into the water sector since the original big stimulus package in 2009 may have largely gone to those utilities who needed it least. If a project is “shovel-ready” it is likely to be a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have. Utilities in cities like Flint or Jackson don’t have the luxury of developing projects on spec.

What it means is that the biggest opportunity in the US water sector is in the underserved. Finding a way to enable 50,000 utilities to offer world-class water and sewer services to the communities they serve would be an initiative that would dwarf the impact of the Clean Water Acts of the early 1970s.

At the end of last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published its strategy for delivering this transformation. It involves putting $150 million into 29 Environmental Finance Centers to help utilities access $50 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other EPA programmes. It is potentially a game-changer, especially when one realises that the Agency has signed up Moonshot Missions as one of its national coordinators on the project.

Moonshot is the brainchild of former DC Water CEO (and GWI columnist) George Hawkins. He recognises that the scale of the change necessary is a “moonshot”, but he also has a plan for delivering it. He implemented an impressive turnaround at DC Water, and since leaving the utility, he has been working to repeat that success in disadvantaged communities across America. He is doing it by bringing utilities together in peer-to-peer networks and implementing technologies that deliver better service at lower cost. It is already delivering results in a dozen or so communities.

The challenge now is to find a way to scale it up. We need a model which works for thousands of communities across America. Not dozens.

That is why “Delivering the Moonshot” lies at the core of the pre-conference workshop for the American Water Summit in Los Angeles on 24 January. We will be bringing utility leaders from underserved communities across America together with the experts who can make a difference, in order to make sure that the EPA programme is a success right from the get-go. It is also an opportunity to understand how we can make it work at scale.

The US has been awash with bad economic news in recent months. After 20 years of easy credit, consumer spending and business investment are highly vulnerable to interest rate rises. However, there are 50 billion reasons why we in the water sector should be optimistic as we move into 2023. Together, we can make it a transformational year.

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