The world of water through the eyes of GWI publisher Christopher Gasson.
When will water technology become truly global? At the moment some of it is, but a lot of it isn’t. I have always seen it as GWI’s job to change that. We connect great ideas with the people who can use them most. Nevertheless it is still a surprise in 2021 to be told by a German utility that it doesn’t want its sludge treatment upgrade listed in our project tracker because “we don’t want outsiders involved”.
One can see where they are coming from. Sludge is an area of technology where Germany has led the world. It was one of the first to ban landfill disposal. Anyone visiting the IFAT trade fair in Germany will be amazed by the number of companies supplying sludge handling equipment. Why bother with foreigners when there is such a wealth of local players?
At the same time, it is difficult not to feel that closing their eyes to what the rest of world is doing is a potentially expensive choice. New phosphorus recovery regulations mean that new technologies and new processing models are needed. Germany is the first country to introduce such regulations, but German companies don’t have the monopoly of potential solutions.
The reason why globalisation fails in water is because cost is not the main driver. Public safety trumps everything else, and as unfamiliarity is easily equated with risk, it is easy to justify ignoring what the rest of the world can offer. This insularity is particularly easy to justify when the utility sector is fragmented. Bavaria, for example, has 2,261 public water suppliers. On average they serve around 5,500 people each (700 fewer than the average utility in the US). It means that even ideas from out of state seem very foreign to a lot of Stadtwerke (municipal service corporations). Combine that with the fact that most prefer to work with local engineering firms, and you have the perfect environment to see everything as being not invented here.
The US might be in a similar situation. Although it has stronger national engineering firms than Germany, the ‘buy American’ requirements that grow out of federal funding provide an excuse not to look too far for the best solution.
My suspicion is that the biggest cost of water’s insularity is not in sub-scale second-rate technologies with comfortable dominance in their home markets. It is in closed thinking around the whole system of procurement. For example, it might be possible to desalinate water for $0.40/m3 in the Gulf region; in the US, it is a challenge to desalinate water for less than $1.20/m3. Some of that difference may be to do with higher labour, permitting and environmental costs, but at least $0.20 of the difference is likely to be to do with America’s system of procurement. It may be competitive in the sense that contractors compete against each other to bid for projects, but it is extraordinarily uncompetitive in terms of the overall cost of the system. If contractors in France, Spain, Israel, Germany, and the US were all challenged to build the same plant in the same place with the same unit input costs, each based on the procurement models used in their own countries, my guess is that Germany and the US would end up with infrastructure that cost 20-30% more than the competition.
It is nice to think of localism as a way of keeping wealth within the community, but really it is just a system of redistributing income from a mass of ratepayers to a smaller elite with comfortable jobs. Ultimately localism ends up driving away those (typically younger) people who pay the costs of uncompetitive services, but don’t get the benefits of insider jobs.
GWI will carry on tracking German sludge projects for outsiders. Where else will innovation come from?
My comments: Despite the above market conditions, FLC has sold more than 300 MABR plants and counting. That should say something about MABR and the co..
FLC Price at posting:
17.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)
Water technology was not invented here