Elevating water conscious with IoT and the cloud at the city of Breda

One of the foundations of modern society is its ability to deliver clean water and sanitation deposal. At the heart of this process is the water-energy nexus where electricity generation often consumes large amounts of water and water supply and sewage disposal are substantial electric loads. Optimizing this water-energy nexus helps society to reduce its carbon footprint and achieve greater resource conservation.

The city of Breda is a municipality in the southern part of the Netherlands. Working with Microsoft partner ireckon, the city set out to optimize the water-energy nexus by developing an IoT solution that links water and sewage plants’ physical sensors to provide real-time data about water flow, asset management and enables predictive maintenance. With this solution the city is able to adjust pumping levels more efficiently to optimize use of the pumps and decrease wasted power consumption.

Ireckon’s solution has enabled the city of Breda to optimize asset management, energy and maintenance costs and help prevent flooding. This solution runs in our Azure cloud environment and uses Power BI for a self-service analytics exposing information to the citizens of Breda to raise social conscious concerning the water supply and its optimal usage. Since the solution is based on our cloud technology, it is a highly scalable solution that can be applied to other cities and Utilities small or very large. This is a great example of elevating water conscious with IoT and the cloud. You can see the innovation at work by viewing this case study video. May the Cloud be with You! – Jon C. Arnold