CII Water Use Patterns, Reliability Values, and Roles for Reuse

Water is an essential and highly valuable input to most production processes. Commercial, industrial, and institutional (CII) businesses depend on reliable water supplies—of suitable quantity and quality—to produce their goods and services. Limitations or uncertainties in CII water supply—such as potential service interruptions or variations in water quality—can significantly impede the ability of a CII business to effectively compete and remain economically viable.

Communities in turn rely on these CII enterprises to provide jobs, tax revenues, and other essential benefits to their regional economies. There is thus a crucial symbiotic relationship between a community’s ability to provide a reliable water supply to its CII customers, and the local CII sector’s ability to compete in the global market and thereby provide economic and social benefits to the community.

Utility managers and others recognize that water supply yield reliability is highly valued by their communities, including both residential and CII customers. But the absence of suitable CII water use and reliability valuation data makes these reliability benefits difficult to quantify in a meaningful and credible manner. This impedes the implementation of reuse, complicates planning, and adds a challenge to securing state and federal funding.

This presentation describes a soon to be completed WateReuse Research Foundation project (WRF-09-04) that describes and estimates the levels and patterns of CII water use, and explores the value of water supply reliability to key components of the CII sector. These insights can be applied by water agencies to better assess CII water needs, and also assess the economic value of offering CII customers with reuse (or desal) as drought-resistant, reliability-enhancing water supply options.

This project investigates the level of water use for various key customer classes from the CII sectors, based on empirical investigations of water use levels and patterns in several case study areas and key subsectors within the CII sectors. This information is designed to be used for multiple purposes, such as evaluating the added value of water reuse (or other supply-enhancing) projects that increase the reliability of a community’s water supply for key businesses. By examining water use patterns and considering the value of water supply reliability in important commercial and industrial sectors, this study provides utilities with a useful basis for determining how much “value added” may be provided by their potential investments in water reuse and other projects that enhance overall water supply reliability.