This report provides Transforma Insights’ view on the Water Smart Meters IoT market. The transition from traditional water meters to smart water meters is a global IoT initiative for water conservation and hygiene. By 2033, 789 million smart water meters will be deployed.
The key driver behind the increase in their installation is water scarcity due to increasing consumption, water losses, and leakage. Other reasons include the ability to monitor and diagnose domestic, commercial, and industrial water consumption patterns as well as track costs with respect to resource utilisation.
The report provides a detailed definition of the sector, analysis of market development and profiles of the key vendors in the space. It also provides a summary of the current status of adoption, including a detailed assessment of the progress of rollouts, and Transforma Insights’ ten-year forecasts for the market. The forecasts include analysis of the number of IoT connections by geography, the technologies used (including splits by 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, LPWA, short range, satellite and others), as well as the revenue split between module, value-added connectivity and services. A full set of forecast data, including country-level forecasts, sector break-downs and public/private network splits, is available through the IoT Forecast tool.
The report examines key factors that are influencing the development of the market, including:
This section of the report begins with an explanation of how water smart meters can deal with the major issue of water loss (including using sensors for leakage detection based on the water flow rate). It also stresses that water leakage from common households results in a huge amount of water loss, which validates the use of smart water meters. For instance, the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) claims that household leaks waste nearly 1 trillion gallons of water annually in the US. It also expounds on how detecting water leakage helps a utility by identifying leaks before the metering point (based on unexpected drops in water pressure within the water grid).
This section begins with an explanation of how the increasing global population has increased the demand for water across various verticals such as agriculture, domestic households, and industries. It then discusses how smart water meters have witnessed significant demand in regions such as the Middle East and Africa that face water crises, either due to extreme climatic conditions or because of a higher population density.
It also talks about how these meters can monitor and diagnose domestic, commercial, and industrial water consumption patterns and track costs with respect to resource utilisation, which will propel their demand. It then charts some geographical locations that have witnessed widespread deployment of smart water meters (such as Palo Alto and Long Beach in California).
This section of the report focuses on the cost of smart water metering systems, which is quite high, and may affect their adoption (since end users will have to bear the additional costs). For example, a study by MDPI finds that the cumulative cost of deployment and maintenance of 424 residential smart water meters in Mangueiral (Brazil) amounted to USD89,340. However, it also talks about some instances where the deployment of such meters benefited the authorities. To cite an instance, in the 'Smart Seosan City' project in South Korea, the analyzed benefits amounted to KRW 1.18 billion (USD 898,896.9) over the 8-year project duration.
This section discusses the various communication technologies used in the highly fragmented smart water market, including LPWA technologies such as NB-IoT and LoRaWAN, and the reasons behind their adoption. For instance, many smart water meters naturally run on LPWA technologies since they only generate a small amount of traffic. It also talks about some particular cases, where Short Range technologies or mesh technologies are deployed.
In a tabular format, this section also describes the connectivity technologies used across various geographies, including USA, Canada, China, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, India, Singapore, and others.
This section of the report focuses on the lack of government initiatives regarding the deployment of smart water meters. It further talks about the general public resentment about their deployment, especially in countries like South Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and a few Southeast Asian markets (mainly due to poor understanding and unclear definitions about them). However, it also takes into account some of the steps (such as imposing fines and penalties) taken by the concerned authorities (like the governments of various countries) to bring about behavioural changes towards water conservation, which will act as a good incentive to adopt smart water meters.
It then talks in detail about water smart meter rollouts across various geographies, including the USA, China, the UK, France, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and others.
This section also has some examples of relevant IoT deployments in this application, like the Busselton Water installing smart water meters in collaboration with Telstra in early 2019 to collect sensor data such as water pressure and consumption from a new generation of digital water meters.
The key vendors section lists some of the main providers of products and services related to the market such as Landis+Gyr, Itron, Badger Meter, Diehl Metering, Neptune Technology Group (Roper Technologies), Xylem Inc. (Sensus), Kamstrup, Aclara, and Siemens. The report provides profiles of the various vendors including aspects most relevant to this Application Group, such as product offerings, pricing, financial results, and technology.
In the market forecasts section, we provide a summary of the forecasts from the Transforma Insights IoT Forecast Database:
The report charts the growth in the number of devices, which will grow from 296 million in 2023 to 789 million in 2033.
Transforma Insights forecasts are compiled on a country-by-country basis. This report includes a regional summary, showing splits between Australasia, Greater China, North America, Europe, Japan, Latin America, MENA, Russia & Central Asia, South East Asia, South Korea, India & South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Transforma Insights’ IoT forecasts include splits between the various connectivity technologies as follows: 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G mMTC, 5G non-mMTC, LPWA (non-mMTC), Satellite, Short Range, and Other.
This section discusses which technologies will be used in the water smart meters application group.
This part of the report discusses the market growth in terms of revenue (module revenue, service wrap revenue, and VAC revenue). Transforma Insights estimates that the revenue in the Water Smart Meters Application Group will grow at a CAGR of 13%.
