Johannesburg, 28 Sep 2021
Smart city projects with significant impact can be implemented quickly and deliver measurable returns on investment, according to experts set to present at an upcoming webinar for public sector stakeholders.
Clive Charlton, Head of Solution Architecture, Sub-Saharan Africa at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Dr Denisha Jairam-Owthar, Chief Information Officer, Metro Services: City of Johannesburg, will participate in the AWS webinar "Building citizen-focused smart cities of the future", to be staged on 7 October.
The webinar will examine how to enhance citizens’ end-to-end experience of public services, thereby encouraging transparency and improving service delivery.
Charlton says the AWS cloud lowers the barrier to entry to even small and mid-sized municipalities, to allow them to begin experimenting with smart city innovations. “Establishing a business case and potential return on investment is quite easy in many cases – for example, when addressing the challenge of non-revenue water,” he says.
Non-revenue water – water unaccounted for due to issues such as leaks, broken pipes, meter under-registration, meter tampering and unauthorised consumption – is a significant challenge in South Africa. The 2030 Water Resources Group reports that up to 41% of municipal water in South Africa does not generate revenue, resulting in losses of nearly R10 billion a year.
Says Charlton: “With better and cheaper smart meters, municipalities could gain a near real-time view of water demand and consumption, so measurably reducing non-revenue water volumes and demonstrating ROI. Smart city solutions such as these pay for themselves very quickly.”
By adding smart meter data analytics, utilities and municipalities can combat non-revenue water losses and also enrich metering data with other information sources, like geographic information systems, CIS and weather data for various use cases, such as forecasting usage, detecting system anomalies, and analysing service outages.
An AWS Quick Start, which deploys a Smart Meter Data Analytics platform on the AWS Cloud, helps utilities tap the unrealised value of consumption data while removing undifferentiated heavy lifting for utilities.
Charlton notes the benefits extend beyond immediate savings for a municipality: they also improve citizens’ experience and in the longer term, potentially reduce the costs of water for citizens and improve water security.
The AWS webinar "Building citizen-focused smart cities of the future" webinar is part of a series of events hosted by AWS in collaboration with ITWeb for public sector decision-makers. The webinar will be held on 7 October.
To register for this event, go to https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/building-citizen-focused-smart-cities-of-the-future/
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