Cleantech panel: The days of cheap water are over

Leaders at the Cleantech Forum XXI in San Francisco today said the days of cheap water are over.

The developing world is still struggling to provide usable water to its residents, while water shortages in the developed world have put a new focus on expensive technologies.

“Water has never been priced properly, but in effect the laws of supply and demand still apply,” said Peter Williams, CTO of IBM's Big Green Innovations, a $1 billion effort by IBM to improve the energy efficiency of its technologies (see IBM rides third wave of cleantech). “Water will become more scarce or more expensive … and the interest in managing it better and making better decisions will grow.”

One of the companies aiming to help manage limited water supplies is startup Palo Alto, Calif.-based Driptech, which is seeking angel funding for its technology to make the cheapest manufacturing techniques for plastic tubing to be used in drip irrigation. CEO Peter Frykman told the Cleantech Group after the panel that his company is developing “radically decentralized manufacturing” to be deployed 100 miles from the user instead of mass-produced and shipped worldwide.

"The mindset you have to get in is everybody on the planet has access to some amount of water, and the question is how do you use that water efficiently,” he said, noting that many of his intended market hauls water from a nearby river or by using pumps. “Why haul extra water and dump on ground with an inefficient irrigation system?”

Driptech has started a pilot with 15 vegetable farmers in Southern India to test its piping with precision-drilled holes. The company is very early stage, operating out of a garage in Palo Alto and seeking seed capital.

“It’s not a technological innovation but a change in the mindset that needs to happen to commercialize and develop these technologies,” Frykman said.

Williams said it’s a change in mindset among consumers that is necessary to change water waste in the developed world. The drought in California this year means some farmers will get no water unless they pay to pump water to them. In that way, water is becoming more expensive. And residential consumers would be likely to reduce their usage if they could see immediate readings of water usage, much like what is being developed for energy usage.

The technology for consumers to have real-time information of water use doesn’t exist and is a huge opportunity, Williams said (see A new market for advanced water technologies).

“You can’t find a console for the refrigerator that provides details on consumption and what your bill is going to be if you carry on at the current rate. That’s a tremendous gap in the market,” he said. “You can get Web readout, but by the time you get to your computer or your cell phone the moment is lost. There’s an extra step. … Whoever comes up with that device would make lot money.”

Andrew Williamson, director of PHYSIC Ventures, which has invested in Pionetics, said some of the most attractive water technologies are coming out of Australia to reduce energy consumption of the water sector and change consumers’ behavior (see Cash flowing in the water industry).

“Large parts of the cleantech and water space that don’t fit with the VC model,” he said. “We’re continuing to search for technologically-heavy, rapidly-scalable opportunities … and looking to take technologies from other venture-backable fields and move it into water,” such as ultraviolet LED technologies that can be used for water purification.

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