Let's embrace smart water grids

By Koo Ja-kyun

Even a few years ago, the term “smart grid” was unfamiliar to most people.

To help ordinary people understand what it is, one had to describe the lifecycle of electricity from production to consumption.

It went like this: when electricity is generated, its voltage would be raised to hundreds of kilovolts to minimize the loss of power in transmission.

Then, it would be lowered by stages to 220 volts for use at home.

That was just half the story. The other half was about smart grids.

As the chairman of Korea Smart Grid Association, I had to think of a better way of making it understood.

My “eureka” moment came one morning.

While turning on the tap to rinse my mouth after brushing my teeth, I suddenly recalled a lecture which compared electrical power systems with the flow of water and sewage.

It was water that flows from high places to lower grounds.

Adopting the water explanation was easier than using volts and amperes.

Water and electricity are like twins, identical not in appearance but in characteristics.

We take them for granted but cannot live without them like air; we mistakenly call charges for fees to be paid for usage like a kind of tax; we barely sense their scarcity; and we find it difficult to actually save them even when we say that we should do so.

When we find fault with a free spending habit, we say “spending it like water” not “spending it like electricity.”

What is urgently needed for both resources is effective management to balance supplies.

For water, which is created by nature, the task may be more difficult to manage and control than man-made electricity.

The fact that we seldom realize their scarcity shows that the Korea Electric Power Corp. and K-water have managed the resources well so far.

But human nature always desires convenience.

We cannot give up the convenience we have become accustomed to no matter how often we say that we have to save electricity.

We cannot have a limitless supply of either. It is not right to build more power plants, to use them only for a certain time of year when the power consumption hits a ceiling.

That’s why we are gradually introducing a smart grid system, which applies information and communication technologies to existing power grids to facilitate more effective use of limited power resources.

The same applies to water supply.

Korea’s limited land space is crowded with people. This has made the nations suffer from insufficient per-capita water resource.

Excessive rainfall causes floods and insufficient rainfall disastrous droughts. We could solve such problems if we had enough room to store water. But we also cannot build dams without limits.

That’s why we need a smart management system for water resource like smart grid for electricity.

Up to 40 percent of total electricity production vanishes into the air and 31 percent of annual water resources are wasted in floods.

The “smart water grid” solution is drawing attention because water is a valuable resource like electricity.

If we can not only save valuable resources through such future technology but also foster it as the national economy’s new growth engine, it will be much greater.

The global smart grid market has recorded 28 percent annual growth rate and is expected to reach $124.2 billion by 2017. The world’s water resource market is projected to reach $689 billion by 2018.

The World Water Forum, which is widely recognized as the foremost meeting of the water industry, has been held in the southern city of Daegu since Sunday.

In line with the forum’s slogan — Water for our Future — I hope the smart grid and smart water grid will work to save valuable resources and to provide momentum with the nation to become the new global industry leader.

Koo Ja-kyun, chairman of Korea Smart Grid Association and of LS Industrial System, contributed this column to mark the ongoing Seventh World Water Forum in Daegu.