From a demand management perspective, the project will enable an informed development of a future Demand Management Strategy (5 Es), particularly in relation to:
- Engineering reviewing water reduction targets in the Pimpama Coomera Master Plan.
- Encouragement and Education identifying the most effective incentives and education programs and enabling them to target the most water efficient devices/actions within households.
- Economics enabling informed decisions to be made regarding the introduction of end-use based water, wastewater and recycled water tariffs.
This project has been designed to ensure that a number of highly relevant research outcomes will be derived for the Australian water resource management community, including:
Engineering
- Gaining a comprehensive understanding of potable water end-user consumption characteristics through smart-meter implementation and customer surveys;
- Gaining a better understanding of the relationship between end-user consumption characteristics and urban development planning, seasonal variations, and household demographics (to name a few relationships); and
- Enabling effective modelling of the dual reticulated system, a review of the desired standards of service (DSOS) and optimisation of the size of water and recycled water infrastructure.
Encouragement and Education
- > Having a database of end-user demographic and water consumption characteristics information that can be cross-referenced to assist with urban water decision-making;
- > Having a series of justification tools, which can be confidently utilised to substantiate the impact of demand management initiatives; and
- > Giving home and business owners (via water-use breakdown summaries) an opportunity to evaluate their own water usage patterns, thus empowering them to reduce certain elements of their water consumption (e.g. residents having long showers, garden usage, etc.).
Economics
- Government authorities will be able to utilise the findings of this major study to help formulate more equitable and sustainable urban water resource management policies; and
- New theories and paradigms of water trading economics will be established through this research and may be utilised by individual water authorities for pricing.