Smarter infrastructure, more sustainable use: Gary Wong on water utilities innovation

Posted: June 23, 2025

As climate pressures mount and service delivery grows more complex, the water and wastewater industry is adapting with new technology. To understand how utilities are responding, I spoke with Gary Wong, AVEVA’s Global Segment Lead for Power, Utilities, and Infrastructure. Drawing on decades in the industry, Wong reflects on how utilities are contending with aging infrastructure and system integration woes—alongside the growing role of technology in everything from leak detection to algae bloom forecasting.

Now you’re AVEVA’s Global Segment Lead for Power, Utilities, and Infrastructure, but previously, you’d been an Industry Principal for Water and Wastewaster. What drew you to the industry?

GW: My undergrad degree is in chemical engineering. My father and I had our own chemicals business, which we eventually sold, so I was looking for something else to do, and on my commute in Vancouver, I was seeing this massive construction project—big concrete pours happening. I was curious what they were doing. It turned out to be a massive wastewater treatment facility that was getting a big upgrade. At the time, it was the largest concrete pour in North America. When I asked around about a job, they said they needed people in software and hardware on controls and automation, which was one of my interests. I've always been involved in computers. I did work in AI way back in the early 90s during my undergrad. So that's how I got my start in the industry.

What is it about the industry that continues to hold your interest?

GW: Water is one of those necessities, along with electricity, that a lot of people take for granted. We just turn on the taps and water flows or refresh the toilets and water gets treated. The full cost of water is not apparent. If you take a look at the value chain of water, not only is it critical to our survival but also for our economy—the power plants, the mines, our agriculture, our cities. It’s very important to be good stewards of the environment, and also to understand what water resources we have and how we can be more efficient with it. We at AVEVA play a big part in this on a daily basis.

Five years ago, the unknown was the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused an acceleration in the adoption of technology, both in hardware and software. Utilities needed to remotely manage facilities as opposed to sending people on site.

We're seeing a lot more sensors and instrumentation being deployed. A lot of these sensors, these IoT-type devices, don't necessarily come through a typical SCADA system or an automation system. They’re from multiple vendors that might have their own systems or that data might go directly to the cloud. This creates system and data silos, which makes it very difficult for a water utility to make sense of. They're being bombarded and inundated by a lot of data.

Speaking of climate change, I read a case study about the Hampton Roads Sanitation District in Virginia—actually my hometown—where they used AVEVA software to respond to pump station overflows ahead of storms.

GW: That's a great story on the wastewater side about how they're blending and integrating a number of data sources to figure out how to react in advance to hurricanes. Another part of that story was how they’re using the AVEVA PI System to monitor their data centers. They basically caught a high temperature and sent people to go investigate and get that resolved preventing an outage a few days before a massive storm came in. Imagine if they lost their data center right before? They would have been severely crippled.

Another story I like on the drinking water side is from White House Utility District in Tennessee. The story is all about leak detection. Within three and a half days of deploying the solution, they found a $300,000 a year leak they never knew about. In the first year, they saved $900,000, reducing their leaks and also deferred capital expenditures of $15 to 20 million. By fixing leaks immediately, they increased their capacity, which meant they didn’t have to spend millions of dollars on new water resources or expanding their facilities.

It seems like an enormous saving for like a publicly funded utility.

GW: WHUD provides water to about 100,000 people, so if you imagine larger cities—Los Angeles, New York, Chicago—you can see how the potential savings scale up significantly for larger utilities.

When it comes to regulatory compliance, what are utilities reporting on and how is digital tech helping to facilitate that reporting?

GW: We've got great solutions that help them monitor all their processes—whether it’s chemical use in water treatment or wastewater discharge quality. All water discharge that goes out into the environment needs to safe for the environment and often the discharge is cleaner than the water bodies they go into.

That data can come from different systems like a SCADA system, or it can come from laboratory information management systems. Our solutions can automate that whole compliance process.

We've seen some customers that might have taken four hours out of their day to compose compliance reports. They’re now able to automate those completely, so utilities can send them off electronically to the state regulatory board, the EPA, whoever those bodies might be, on a daily or monthly basis.

For example, with recycled water, utilities have to track where that water goes—if it’s recharged into groundwater, for example. There are always regulations that they need to meet. In the UK, there are regulations around leakage rates, so we're helping a lot of those big utilities there in their monitoring.

What about the use of digital twins in the utilities?

GW: All these utilities have some form of a digital twin. We see some utilities using even our engineering solutions, such as AVEVA™ E3D Design, to have 3D representations that can be used to optimize the operations and maintenance side of facilities.

Are you seeing utilities laser scan existing infrastructure to generate accurate engineering drawings?

GW: Absolutely. For existing or new facilities we can create 3D views and how things interact. More importantly, there are a lot of situations where AVEVA™ Asset Information Management might be more helpful. It can be very difficult for utilities to find information, such as the latest safety operating procedures or lockout procedures, tied back to drawings and real-time operations. That's another facet that we can help with, not only for our EPC customers, but also the actual utilities themselves.

The other aspect is predictive maintenance on pumps and motors that are used in the water distribution network, but also within plants like big centrifuges. Utilities want to catch failures before they happen and ensure they’re servicing assets on time.

Utilities need to be efficient as possible because water wastewater utilities in a city or town are the single largest consumers of power—electricity specifically, but on an energy basis they could be using electricity or natural gas.

How are utilities meeting their net-zero goals? Are you seeing renewables, like solar, on site?

GW: Yes, but you might also see pumped storage hydropower facilities. In those cases, utilities will pump water up during off-peak hours, so the utility stores the water at higher elevation and then during peak electricity pricing periods, the utility would then then drain water from the reservoir and use the gravity to drive a hydroelectric generator.

For utilities on the wastewater side, there’s an anaerobic digestion process in wastewater treatment they can use to create digester gas or biogas, which they can clean and use in the place of diesel or natural gas. A lot of times that gas would have been flared off in the environment, leading to greenhouse gas emissions and carbon emissions. Instead, some utilities are reusing that gas, which could account for up to 50% of their energy needs. That's a pretty good savings, and it's good for the environment as well.

Do you see that often, or is that in some particularly innovative utilities?

GW: It really depends on whether that planning was there in the first place. In the mid to late 90s, when I worked at a water utility, we planned that out as part of the treatment process. We had ways to capture that gas, clean it up, and basically run it through four massive co-gen engines that would then use that as the energy for our plant. It provided huge savings on the electrical consumption side and cost.

Last year, I wrote an article about recycled water and direct potable reuse. Do you see that as the future of utilities?

GW: Definitely in some areas. I don't see why not. You probably read about the public perception of recycled water—the whole “ick factor.” We wish all people understood that water that we drink has already been recycled many times.

Whether it falls from the sky as rain or is drawn from massive underground aquifers, rivers, or lakes, water moves through treatment processes before returning to the environment—where it begins the cycle all over again.

Could you talk about how you see AI affecting the industry?

GW: I’ve read about technology now using satellites to detect leaks, for example. I believe that’s using AI in those algorithms to determine what is a leak versus a false positive, which would be groundbreaking, but I still think there's a lot of opportunity in the industry using simple first principles engineering without the use of AI.

In Europe, for example, we're working with a utility that’s leveraging a lot of its smart water meter data from people's households. Knowing how that water is being consumed and when will go a long way in terms of being efficient with water use and finding those leaks much more quickly. Part of that project is to possibly use AI to figure out better pumping schedules and better demand forecasting.

In our City of Salem case study in Oregon, they used AI to predict and forecast harmful algae blooms in the Detroit Lake reservoir. These blooms can pose serious risks—not just to pets that might swim in the water, but to people as well because Detroit Lake is the city’s primary water source. There was concern about the potential for system-wide drinking water impacts. The City uses AI there, along with algae level data, weather data, satellite imagery, and lab samples to produce a two-week forecast of potential algae blooms and whether they’re toxic.

What do you foresee as the next opportunity for technology in the industry?

GW: In the value chain of water, the real opportunity is creating a connected community of stakeholders, which would allow us to essentially monitor every drop of water we use. This kind of visibility makes it possible to dramatically improve water efficiency across the entire value chain—from aquifer to industrial or agricultural use. It is completely viable today if the stakeholders took a wider perspective. Part of this is just further engagement to allow these stakeholders to better understand the art of the possible today in terms of efficiency and water conservation.