Brussels is pouring billions into digitising Europe’s water networks, promising fewer leaks and cleaner data, even as hackers test them too.
In Bytom, a mining town in southern Poland, engineers from Emitel, a broadcasting-infrastructure firm better known for television transmitters, have spent the past year fitting remote-reading devices to more than 6,000 water metres. In Wrocław, 200 kilometres to the west, the same company is wiring up 70,000 more, working alongside HSB Stella, a local distributor of Itron metres. Neither town features all that prominently in EU press releases. But this is what water digitalisation looks like once policy becomes practice: pipes fitted with radio modules, town halls able to spot a burst main from a control centre dashboard rather than a panicked resident’s phone call.
On May 27, the European Commission opened a call for evidence on an EU-wide Action Plan for the Digitalisation of the Water Sector, inviting utilities, river-basin managers and technology firms to respond before June 24. Jessika Roswall, the commissioner for environment, water resilience and a competitive circular economy, said the plan would help “unlock the potential of new technologies and digital solutions.” The logic mirrors what is already under way in Bytom and Wrocław. Smart metres, the Commission reckons, can cut water use by up to 25 per cent. Digital monitoring systems save a further five to eight per cent, and automated leak detection another seven to 14 per cent.
Money is already moving ahead of the policy. Edouard Perard, who heads the European Investment Bank’s water division, is overseeing a 15 billion euro lending programme running from 2025 to 2027, intended to draw in a further 25 billion euros from private investors. “This is where water meets business,” he told Reuters last year. On the Costa del Sol, homeowners are an early beneficiary: Acosol, the local utility, is carrying out a 348 million euros investment plan approved after successive droughts, with the EIB covering 175 million euros of it. In March, Raffaele Fitto and Roxana Mînzatu, two of the Commission’s executive vice-presidents, signed off on a mid-term reprogramming that redirected 3.1 billion euros of cohesion funds toward water resilience, part of 34.6 billion euros shifted across five strategic priorities. Cyprus, a small state with an outsized drought problem, put 64 million euros of its own allocation into water alone.
Not without risk
Digitalisation carries its own liabilities. Last December, Romania’s National Cyber Security Directorate confirmed that a ransomware attack had struck Apele Române, the state water agency, compromising around 1,000 IT systems across the authority and 10 of its 11 river-basin administrations. Attackers used Windows’ own BitLocker tool to encrypt files and left a note demanding contact within a week. The agency insisted its hydrotechnical operations, the dams and flood defences, kept running as normal, managed locally by staff using telephones and radios. But its website stayed offline for days, and the episode exposed an uncomfortable gap: Romania’s water infrastructure had not yet been connected to the national cyber-protection system built to shield critical services. A smart metre is, among other things, a networked device.
For companies, the gap between ambition and readiness looks like an opening. Pieter Fossel, chief executive of Hydrosat, raised 51 million euros in January to expand his satellite-based water-monitoring service into Central Asia, alongside the Middle East and Latin America. Water Europe, an industry body, wants Brussels to go further still, proposing a Digital Single Market for Water Data that would let sensors, metres and monitoring platforms talk to each other across borders rather than sitting in national silos. For a region stretching from the Western Balkans to the Caucasus, much of it still reliant on Soviet-era pipework, that combination of EU financing and interoperable standards matters more than the meters themselves.
The scale of the problem is still sobering. Nearly a third of the water pumped into the EU’s public supply networks disappears before reaching a tap, according to the European Environment Agency; in Bulgaria, Croatia and Italy, losses exceed 40 per cent, against about five per cent in the Netherlands. There are still, it appears, plenty of leaks to plug.
Photo: Dreamstime.