Future of Infrastructure: Charting the Future of Water

with Peter Fiske

Peter Fiske is the Executive Director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation. He joined The Future of Infrastructure to talk about the future of water and how infrastructure will need to adapt.

Future of Infrastructure

Host Jeremy Goldberg, Worldwide Director of Critical Infrastructure at Microsoft, is on a journey to learn more about how infrastructure is being built around the world, by talking with public servants, philanthropist, artists and place-makers who have spent their lives working in the public interest. This is a series to help us build things and plan for the future while putting people first.

Peter Fiske is the is the Executive Director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI). He joined The Future of Infrastructure to talk to us about the future of water – and how infrastructure will need to change to combat climate change, become more efficient, and meet demand in the coming decades.

Visit the Future of Infrastructure site for transcripts of all episodes.

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Peter Fiske | LinkedIn

National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) – Innovating for a water and energy secure future for the United States (nawihub.org)

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Episode summary

Peter Fiske is the Executive Director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI). He joined The Future of Infrastructure to talk to us about the future of water – and how infrastructure will need to change to combat climate change, become more efficient, and meet demand in the coming decades.

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Charting the Future of Water

We could see a future in which buildings themselves cleanse and reuse 80% of their water. It still has a centralized supply, but the net volume of water that’s needed is much lower, because the water is being used more efficiently in the building.
– Peter Fiske, Executive Director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation

Investing in water infrastructure to combat the impact of climate change

Peter Fiske, Executive Director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation explained that the climate issue is a water issue: “And one of the researchers that is in the climate environment said that the delivery vehicle for the effects of climate change will be water. And so, as you look around the world, that’s kind of what you see: the storms are stormier, the floods are bigger, and the droughts are longer and deeper.

And so, we, you know, as a species have the challenge to adapt and to build and rebuild our infrastructure in a way that it’s not just coping or somehow managing to get by, but maybe even, dare I say, embracing a more variable climate world.”

Learning from the energy transition

According to Fiske, water infrastructure will need to change in a similar way to the power sector: “That’s where we see part of the future for resilient infrastructure, because just as we did with the power sector, we used to generate electricity with these large, centralized treatment plants. Really there’s one per city. They generate all the power. And it went down, everything goes dark, right? Today, we still have that centralized infrastructure, but people are adopting solar panels and batteries, which means we have a hybrid system of both central and distributed.

The water sector we see has the potential for the same transformation. We could see a future in which buildings themselves cleanse and reuse 80% of their water. It still has a centralized supply, but the net volume of water that’s needed is much lower, because the water is being used more efficiently in the building,”

Using desalination to access untapped water reserves

Fiske explains that it isn’t just about making the current system more efficient, it’s also about expanding our ability to use water from previously untapped sources: “But today’s desalination technologies don’t use heat. They’re using something called a reverse osmosis membrane. And the way this works is you have a membrane that can pass water. But you know the chemical drive is to push water into the salt. So you squeeze on the salty water at high pressure, and you force the freshwater through that membrane, sort of like a sieve. And that freshwater can then come out the other side and be used.

What you’re left with is an even more salty concentrate we call brine. If you’re by the ocean, you can take that brine and – and mix it up with extra seawater and discharge it safely. And that’s why most of the desalination today happens by the ocean. Most of our large desal plants in the United States and in the Middle East are all ocean desal plants.

NAWI’s program got interested in the fact that there’s lots of other salty water around the world. In fact, there’s groundwater around the United States that’s not as salty as seawater, but it’s too salty to use. That’s called brackish groundwater. And Jeremy, that represents a huge reservoir of water supply for the United States that is untapped.”