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When it comes to projecting savings in water and energy efficiency, baselines are essential. Recently, five graduate students collected data for one of the Alliance’s Watergy programs in South Africa in order to help Cape Town municipality establish a much-needed baseline for improved energy and water resource management.
In spring of 2009, water and energy resource managers of Cape Town municipality in South Africa received a visit from five graduate students who asked to look through their records. Students in George Washington University’s (GW) Capstone program run through the Elliott School of International Studies were trying to determine how much energy was being used to deliver residents one of their constitutional rights – the right to free and clean water.
Detailed in Section 27 of South Africa’s 1996 constitution, the right to water and other basic resources directs the state to “take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realization” of this socio-economic right.
The challenge for the municipalities of Cape Town was to deliver water to municipalities varying in terrain and size and spread across an arid, water-scarce area. In addition, the municipalities had been condensed from 36 to six to just one, known as Cape Town municipality, which meant that delivery data was inconsistent and many facilities were overburdened. Despite the constitution’s mandate, “achievable resources” were not enough, it seemed, to ensure 24 hours of water delivery service to residents, particularly via an aging infrastructure prone to leaks and waste and a lack of water and energy monitoring
As part of the USAID-funded Increasing Sustainable Local Government Services (ISLGS) project implemented by the Louis Berger Group in South Africa, initiatives were undertaken in partnership with local governments that would not only improve water delivery, but more importantly increase their energy efficiency by decreasing the amount of water wastage and energy demand. An international contractor, Louis Berger implements water and sanitation projects on the continent and around the world.
Having seen the impact of the Alliance’s trademark Watergy process elsewhere in the world and in South Africa, Louis Berger partnered with the Alliance team for the ISLGS program. Says Suzanne Young of the Louis Berger Group, “[ASE]’s value to Louis Berger and ISLGS is that they understood at a local level how to get municipalities to commit to the project (by understanding the benefits)” The Cape Town municipality project was particularly challenging in that it required a shift in operations at the ground level as well as at the top. Watergy’s training of local stakeholders – an essential component of the program –would be especially critical in the case of Cape Town, which needed to improve standard operational procedures in water service delivery and management.
The GW Capstone students can attest to this. Having been subcontracted by ASE to help gather data for the ISLGS Watergy collaboration in Cape Town, the students were assigned the arduous task of collecting water and energy consumption data from the appropriate municipality water and energy resource managers and staff to determine the amount of energy used to provide an end-user with 1kl of water. With this information, it would be possible to calculate the amount of energy saved, as well as potential monetary savings accrued through Watergy interventions.
Over the course of just two weeks, the five GW students teamed up with Mike Rabe, director of the Alliance’s affiliate RE-Solve program, to meet with 24 municipality officers and assess their data. Although all officers were responsive, their data varied from detailed spreadsheets to no records at all. In addition to the lack of consistency, the students also encountered dysfunctional equipment that made it difficult to perform their own assessments. Capstone project leader Kim Jessen also noted that the municipality officers were “missing a big picture strategy when it came to service delivery and the potential for reducing electricity costs…they may or may not be interested in increasing efficiency.” This lack of strategy has implications for progress, she noted: “In order to maximize efficiency, you need someone to come in with a vision and the energy to move it forward.”
Equally as important to the vision is the training to support it. As Pei Cheng, a Capstone student who now works at the Alliance to Save Energy, noted, “Energy efficiency strategies can potentially be quick, effective, and low-cost alternatives to replacing infrastructure, but even with such interventions, it is important to work with local partners to ensure that water and energy data is properly monitored and recorded so that water demand and savings can continue to be realized.”
The data collected by the Capstone students was enough to determine potential water and energy savings in future interventions, as well as provide an opportunity to make a solid business case for energy efficiency and related training. “Once you are able to quantify the savings and present them to the stakeholders, people – practitioners and policymakers – are able to appreciate them,” says Young. To this degree, the efforts of the GW students successufully generated future buy-in and support from those trying to deliver on the South African promise to its citizens to provide access to water.
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