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The Transparent Utility

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Utility diagram

Use real operating data from Stanford’s Codiga Resource Recovery Center (CR2C), a mini-wastewater utility on campus, to develop a dashboard app for water utilities that would help the public and regulators monitor the performance of utilities and ensure that public health and the environment are protected.

No one thinks of where their water comes from until they read a news story about lead poisoning citizens or a sinkhole opening in downtown. No one thinks of where their waste goes until a beach is closed, a sewer backs up into a basement, or a historic drought makes people wonder if we could do something better than dump billions of gallons a day of water into the ocean. 

Water utilities like to stay out of the public spotlight, but now that they need to invest billions to modernize their infrastructure, and hope to innovate with water reuse projects and new technology, they need the public’s trust. A real-time dashboard would help utilities build a new relationship with the public, creating deeper accountability and developing the public’s confidence in their utility’s track record. A dashboard could also help streamline and automate reporting and compliance processes with regulators, freeing up resources for other needs. This tool could even leverage analytics and machine learning to improve the performance of the utility itself. 

Here are some ideas to leverage the data generated at CR2C: 

- Integrate the continuous data from the dozens of sensors at CR2C with daily laboratory data to provide a comprehensive, simple online dashboard of how the plant is performing relative to environmental regulations and other benchmarks
- Develop a machine learning algorithm for early detection of anomalies in plant performance that can help target preventative maintenance
- Develop a custom interface for plant operators to rapidly trend and visualize data at different time scales to understand past events and optimize performance