Smart meters to smart city: Gold Coast uses IoT for water management and more

The City of Gold Coast knew they needed to go digital to improve the delivery of services to residents, and at the same time achieve efficiencies for the City. They just weren’t sure of the best way to do it.

Home to around six hundred thousand residents, the City also gains one million visitors every year. This huge influx of visitors impacts different areas of the City, but there wasn’t a view of how assets were being used and when, so routine servicing was applied across the board.

At the same time the Cities water infrastructure needed attention. With the population expected to grow up to 50% in the coming years, there was increasing pressure on water resources.  

With water as the anchor use case, and an eye on the future for other uses, the City evaluated IoT technology and solutions that would fit the bill. They were looking for:

• The ability to deliver on a diverse range of use cases – water monitoring, weather sensing, pedestrian flow counting, asset tracking, barbecue monitoring, drain fullness levels and lighting controls to name a few
• Broad geographic network coverage 
• Ability to scale both the volume of devices and number of use cases 
• Open standards so they can integrate different supplier devices, reducing dependency on vendors 
• Cost efficiencies
• A simple way to access and use their insights.

NNNCo (a Neura parent company) has Australia’s leading IoT connectivity and platform solution, along with global experience in rolling out solutions for Smart Cities. As a result, they were engaged to provide a public IoT network across the Gold Coast Local Government Area (LGA). The flexible IoT solution provides everything the city needs to get access to their environment, namely:

• A wireless network powered by LoRaWAN technology that penetrates underground, through hard surfaces and over long distances, needs only battery-powered sensors, allows massive scalability, and has robust security.
• A single, technology agnostic device and management platform that gives access to the data received over the network and to manage their devices.
• A large selection of proven devices for different use cases that will work on the network.

Dealing with one supplier who took a partnership approach made for a smooth rollout. Best practice and learnings from global deployments gave confidence that everything would work as planned. The resulting network covers 1300 square km across the city, urban and hinterland areas, and is now being used to deliver multiple Smart City initiatives. Let’s look at a few.

Smart water meters

The first solution implemented was the roll out of Smart Meters, commencing in 2020 with the goal of eventually converting up to 180,000 residential water meters to smart meters.

Early results delivered eye watering insights. Providing real-time monitoring of water consumption for the top 5,000 commercial customers identified:

• 10% of customers were experiencing leaks of more than 10 litres per hour.  This equates to two Olympic size swimming pools full of water being lost every day.
• One-third of schools were identified as experiencing concealed water leaks, particularly associated with irrigation systems.
• All told, 92 large concealed leaks – each losing over 100 litres per hour – were identified during the initial smart metering programme phase. 

Fixing these saw the benefits start to flow.

• Cost savings of between AU$1m-AU$1.5m per year, with the savings increasing as more smart meters are rolled out. Some of this is due to fewer water leak rebates that the utility has to provide its customers.
• Improved water consumption patterns, less bill shock for customers, and improved customer experience.

Pressure release valves (PRVs)

Another water use case that delivered fast results related to PRV monitoring. PRV’s are part of the Water Utility Infrastructure and represent a key mechanism for controlling pressure throughout the water network. When not regulated properly it can result in significant customer complaints, as hot water tanks can suddenly break down, resulting in cold showers and unhappy customers.

The traditional SCADA methods had made it un-economical to monitor PRV’s. Using the LoRaWAN network and devices resulted in:

• A 90% reduction in cost and therefore an effective ROI
• Enabled PRV’s to be rolled out across the entire water network infrastructure
• The early detection of pressure issues, and in turn fast resolution, preventing failure of the water network, the continuation of hot showers and a better customer experience.
• The ability to move from periodic maintenance to just-in-time maintenance.

People counting

Placing people counting sensors in specific locations around the city provided data on who was using assets, how and when. This improved facilities management, with public toilet cleaning schedules adjusted to meet demand, and BBQs in parks checked and cleaned based on use. Receiving insights on the usage patterns of assets helps determine asset maintenance and renewal schedules, and the result is clean and well-maintained assets for the community to enjoy.

Waste management

As one of Australia’s most visited cities, there was a strong focus on area beautification. Rubbish bin monitors were introduced to optimise truck routes and ensure full bins are emptied quickly. Truck routes were optimised to ensure they collected full bins quickly. The result has been less visual and physical pollution on both city streets and the surrounding environments. 

Total IoT solution success

The flexible total IoT solution delivers ongoing benefits for the both the City, its residents and visitors. There has been a notable reduction in maintenance costs, downtime has been minimised, and it has enhanced the quality of water services. Moreover, the real-time data and insights gained from the new system has empowered them to make more informed decisions, leading to better planning and future growth strategies. 

The City did indeed go digital, and they are now singing the praises for IoT and its ability to provide accurate, timely data to improve outcomes.

“The LoraWAN network has been a real strategic piece of infrastructure for the city. Certainly for the water and waste business as a central services utility, we’ve been able to use this quite extensively and been able to produce immediate customer benefits.

What we’ve noted is that as soon we use this technology wider areas of the business identify other opportunities for it.” – Chris Owens, City of Gold Coast.

If you'd like to learn more about applying IoT solutions for your town, city or water infrastructure please get in touch, we'd love to help.