IDRICA

Smart management of Aguas de Calpe’s drinking water and sanitation system

Client: Aguas de Calpe
Project location: Alicante, Spain
Drinking water solutions: GoAigua Meter Insights, FlowSens, Water Twin Ace
Wastewater solutions: GoAigua Clog Spot, Sewer Protect, Sewer Twin, Sewer Twin Ace

In this project, the GoAigua platform has been deployed to manage the urban water cycle in the town of Calpe, Alicante (Spain). This municipality undergoes major fluctuations in water consumption with extremely high demand during the summer compared to the rest of the year. In addition, it has to rely on a large number of reservoirs and pumping stations to overcome issues associated with its complicated terrain.

GoAigua has been integrated into the drinking water and sanitation systems of the local utility Aguas de Calpe to tackle these challenges and optimize water cycle management.

In the drinking water network, GoAigua Meter Insights, which offers advanced consumption monitoring; GoAigua FlowSens, which detects non-visible leaks, and GoAigua Water Twin Ace have been deployed. The latter is the Calpe network’s digital twin (DT), one of the few in the world with this technology, which can monitor and modify the hydraulic operations of the entire system thanks to real-time simulation of the results, and detect problems immediately, among other features.

In the sanitation network, GoAigua Clog Spot, which offers early detection of clogging and optimal cleaning management; GoAigua Sewer Protect, which detects unwanted flows, such as seepage and other flows that do not come from drinking water; GoAigua Sewer Twin, which includes independent smart control of chemical dosage to reduce odors; and GoAigua Sewer Twin Ace, the sanitation network’s digital twin that triggers alerts in the event of floods and storms have all been integrated into the system. In addition, automated management and monitoring of pipeline inspections with CCTV cameras has been introduced. These solutions facilitate key tasks such as predicting urban flooding and storm events, simulating rainfall scenarios, and proactively planning cleanups.

Thanks to this project, the town of Calpe has managed to reduce non-revenue water by 35% in the last five years, resulting in distribution network performance of over 89%. This tool helped Aguas de Calpe to become the first water utility in Europe to be certified under the UNE 178101-1 standard for Water Network Management in the Smart Cities environment in April 2019.

Likewise, 26 early warnings have been issued about the risk of urban flooding in one year, which has enabled Aguas de Calpe to optimize its human resource management in these episodes.