RC116 JanFeb 2025 - Magazine - Page 29
cost today, it’s the cost tomorrow and the cost in 50 years.
When municipalities are looking at their business cases, are
they taking that into consideration? There’s a responsibility
for everyone all around to have that long-term thinking
costs, bene昀椀ts, risks, all of those di昀昀erent dimensions.
How can new technology and construction techniques
improve the quality of water infrastructure and increase
its lifespan?
STEPHANIE BELLOTTO: It helps to capture the condition of the
pipe based on 昀氀ow rates; so by doing this, municipalities
can rehabilitate our systems when necessary and avoid
system failures that disrupt life’s necessities.
OWEN JAMES: If you think about when that pipe went in 50
years ago, all of this technology that we take for granted
today didn’t exist. We have the computing power to take
all of this data and store it and do something about it. We
are storing them using SCADA systems and telemetry
systems, and with that electronic data, we’re now able
to apply some sort of analytics and intelligence. I think
a lot of technologies are grappling with the challenge
of advanced metering infrastructure. There is a huge
opportunity here with condition, equipment, thermal
and electrical monitoring, etc. A conversation like this
wouldn’t be right without mentioning AI. We’re going to
RENEWCANADA.NET
see AI being able to make sense of all this data and being
able to provide the opportunity for essentially real time
monitoring.
JOHN GAMBLE: To do that, we need to rethink procurement
fundamentally. Public procurement is based on how
much it costs now. It doesn’t do a very good job of
bringing in life cycle; it actually discourages innovation;
because even if you’re only looking at 20% price, you’re
going to minimally interpret the scope to be competitive.
So that’s the 昀椀rst strike against innovation. Then you
transfer the risk onto the proponents, so you don’t try
anything new because it doesn’t make business sense to
take on all the risk yourselves. And thirdly, a lot of public
owners… want to own the intellectual property and in
many cases they aren’t even sure why. So sometimes
public procurement is a big exercise in whatever you do,
do not innovate. And we need to reward innovation. We
need procurement that takes a life cycle view, not how
much is it costing now but how much is this going to cost
over the project lifespan?
To watch a replay of the entire discussion, visit:
https://www.crowdcast.io/c/municipal-infrastructure.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025 – RENEW CANADA 29
