Digital Water City in Norway

The water sector is willing to increase its efficiency while providing better and more secured water services with regards to water quantity and quality to inhabitants and customers. The smart water principles can help municipalities achieve these goals in an era of digitalization. However, finding the robust solutions respecting required characteristics and properties is the current challenge for water utilities. Since the investments in sensors, models and IT and OT infrastructures are time and resource intensive, municipalities are in constant search for robust and relevant digital solutions to their problematic issues considering cyber-security, interoperability, costs of installation and maintenance. In addition, most of municipalities, especially the small and medium water utilities often face insufficient financial, human and technological resources. Many organizations have limited budgets, aging water systems, and personnel who may lack the knowledge and experience of Smart water concepts in digital era. This leads consequently to untapped potential solutions provided by digitalization in water sector that can improve the return on investments for municipalities. The supplementary funding in DWC-N will be used to provide a wide overview of the current technologies, knowledge, frameworks regarding smart water pillars, especially those developed through European projects in the framework of H2020 to interested Norwegian municipalities, companies and authorities. In the EU project Digital Water City (DWC) advanced digital solutions for the water sector is developed and tested in different European cities. Some of these solutions might be interesting for Norwegian municipalities. There is also ongoing research and development work on the topic of smart digital solution in the Norwegian water sector. In this project, Digital Water City Norway (DWC-N), actors from all parts of the water sector will gather to share experiences from ongoing domestic and international activity, and to share thoughts and ideas related to needs and lack of solutions through the whole water cycle value chain. This way it is possible to identify the greatest needs of the water sector within digitalisation, and then connect these needs against available solutions, or indicate a need for development of new solutions. The project focuses on cooperation, communication and the spreading of knowledge, and one of the main objectives is to bring the industry together in order to bring forth the good solutions that are needed for the Norwegian challenges. In the project there will be two workshops in order to have the relevant actors laying the foundation for what is needed. In workshop #1 the objective is to identify the need of the sector, while in workshop #2 the objective is to connect solutions to needs, and also to identify the need for new solutions. Another important part of the project is to communicate results in order to increase the awareness of digitalisation of the water sector in Norway, and to increase the general competence within the area among relevant actors.

Outcome of the project: - Presentation on the challenges and needs of the Norwegian water market, based on the outcome of the two workshops (Activity 1). - Main report on status, needs and challenges in the Norwegian market (Activity 2). - Memos on digital courses attended under activity 3. Due to corona we attended digital online courses instead of conferences. Impacts of the project are the following: - Challenges and needs in the Norwegian market (formerly not known/understood) are identified. - A network for digitalisation has been created, and will be followed up with regular digital seminars organised by SINTEF, Volue and Norwegian municipalities. - Current gaps in terms of technologies and competence has been identified. - The outcomes of the relevant technologies from EU H2020 Digital Water City project are being disseminated to the Norwegian market through the established network for digitalisation.

The Norwegian water industry employs close to 10 000 persons and consists of 1 600 water utilities, 2 600 wastewater treatment plants and hundreds of companies. The water sector is willing to increase its efficiency while providing better and more secured water services with regards to water quantity and quality to inhabitants and customers. The smart water principles can help municipalities achieve these goals in an era of digitalization. However, finding the robust solutions respecting required characteristics and properties is the current challenge for water utilities. Since the investments in sensors, models and IT and OT infrastructures are time and resource intensive, municipalities are in constant search for robust and relevant digital solutions to their problematic issues. The DWCN project aims at providing a wide overview of the current technologies, knowledge, frameworks regarding smart water pillars, especially those developed through European projects in the framework of H2020 to interested Norwegian municipalities, companies and authorities including H2020 Digital Water City project's outcomes. The DWCN project will be a collaboration between SINTEF and POWEL as two major players in smart water in Norway. The project is strongly supported by Norsk Vann and Bergen Kommune. The main activities include: 1- Two national-level workshops regarding Smart water pillars promoted by Norsk Vann and organized by SINTEF, presentation of different EU H2020 projects funded under Digital water call (H2020-SC5-11-2018) and other EU clusters (ICT4Water). 2- Establishing a current state-of-play in technologies available for smart water in Norway and identify R&D and regulatory gaps in Norway building on the Workshops' outcomes 3- Knowledge acquirement for young Norwegian water professionals 4- Disseminating and communicating the EU H2020 Digital Water City project's outcomes