WEAM4i kick-off meeting: Water & Energy Advanced Management for Irrigation

Water & Energy Advanced Management for Irrigation (WEAM4i) is a project launched under FP7- ENV-2013-WATER-INNO-DEMO-1 and led by ADASA Sistemas.

This is the kick-off meeting to be held in Barcelona (Spain) next 3-4 December 2013.

Agriculture sector is accountable for 30% of the total water consumption in Europe, but reaches up to 70% of total water consumption. In recent years, most of the efforts have been focused on water efficiency, without taking care of energy aspects, resulting in some cases on a significant increase in energy consumption, both per irrigated surface and per volume unit of water.

The WEAM4i project will mainly address 2 of the priorities of the EIP on Water: “Water-Energy nexus” and “Decision support systems (DSS) and monitoring”. The WEAM4i proposal is based on two innovative management concepts:

1. A water&energy smart grid for irrigation: allowing interactive energy use decisions, by introducing demand-side management and matching the consumption to the available energy offer, due to existing water storage capability (in reservoirs or in the soil) that enables an ”near-almost elastic” demand.
2. An innovative, cloud based, integration approach: an ICT platform based on a Service Oriented Architecture, for hosting the DSS applications, while, at field level, the existing local irrigation systems will remain.

Some techniques for resource efficiency at local level will be demonstrated on the irrigation systems aforementioned: Techniques for saving water, for improving the m³/kwh ratio and for the minimisation of the operational cost for water supply infrastructures.

Full-scale[a1]  demonstration activities will be performed in 3 EU countries (PT, ES and DE), covering a wide range of landscapes and crop types, from southern to central EU. They will include substantial validation in real operation in 3 areas, with different irrigation technologies and water management practices, during 2 growing seasons.

The consortium includes partners representing all the actors involved in the irrigation sector: companies, SMEs, research, public bodies, and associations of users. Companies and SMEs will benefit from the future commercialization of the outcomes while the users will reduce the operational costs of their irrigation systems.

Summing up: once important water savings have been achieved, the new challenge for the irrigation sector is to minimise the energy costs. The WEAM4i project aims to provide innovative solutions for this challenge. 

 [a1]Full scale will not be possible in Germany, as storage basins lack!

As stated before, energy costs are one of the main concerns for irrigation sector. Moreover, irrigation is one of the few economical activities where energy use can be adapted to energy offer, because of the capacity to store water in reservoirs, in groundwater, and the fact that the the soil fields can buffer the current demand, acting as well as small reservoirs for water.

Thus, the main concept to be developed is the water demand-side management according to available energy offer. An in order to develop this concept, we will require:

• A water demand forecast, and consequently, an associated energy demand forecast
• Instruments for aggregating the energy demand and trading with it in the energy market
• DSS tools for managing water demand
• Innovative techniques for resource efficiency at local irrigation systems
• And finally, an ICT platform to support the information and the applications

The main objectives for the project are:

• Develop innovative water & energy smart grid for irrigation: energy consumption tactical (day) decisions, introducing demand-side management and matching with available energy offer, thanks to the water storage capability (both in reservoirs or in the ground) and the ‘near-almost elastic’ demand from users
• Demonstrate innovative techniques for resource efficiency at local level:
  • Techniques for the minimisation of the operational cost for water supply infrastructures, as strategical management (week)
  • Techniques for saving water in the local irrigation systems => Saving energy
  • Techniques for improving the ratio m3/kwatt
• Develop an innovative integration approach: an ICT platform based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), for hosting the DSS applications, while, at field level, the existing local irrigation systems will remain.

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