The City of Regina’s water system provides water for residential, commercial, and industrial customers as well as water for irrigation and summer service. The City’s water system serves nearly 70,000 utility accounts for a population of approximately 207,000. In 2002, the City of Regina has initiated a utility-wide program to install a drive-by Automated Meter Reading (AMR) system and replace almost its entire water meter inventory. As this system is approaching the end of its design life of 20 years, the City needs to evaluate and compare the costs and benefits of possible options to maintain current AMR or upgrade to fixed-network advanced metering infrastructure (AMI).

IDS has developed a rigorous cost-benefit analysis procedure and software tool to evaluate a range of possible options and deployment scenarios for maintaining the City’s current AMR system or upgrading to AMI. The analysis was applied to assess economic merits of alternative scenarios and provide a quantitative evaluation of various scenarios in terms of their associated costs and quantifiable benefits. The defined scenarios considered a number of deployment decisions including: deployment period, possibility to coordinate meter replacement with AMI deployment, and use of vendor’s hosted software services (SaaS) versus in-house management of IT systems.

Working closely with City staff and a number of AMI vendors, information on various cost elements associated with current AMR system and possible AMI implementation scenarios have been collected and used to analyze whole life costs and economic merits of each scenario over 20-year planning horizon. In each scenario analysis, all yearly capital and operating cost and saving over the 20 year period were estimated and converted to present value using an appropriate discount rate. The analysis considered quantifiable economic benefits of AMI systems, namely, operating costs savings and the revenue recovery due to meter replacement associated with AMI deployment. Key economic measures, including net present value (NPV) and benefit cost ratio (BCR), of possible AMI deployment scenarios were assessed and compared. Analysis results and recommendations on a preferred option and deployment considerations will assist in preparing a business case using a rigorous economic analysis and objective evaluation of possible scenarios.

The City of Regina is experiencing significant economic and population growth, which is projected to continue into the future. As competing priorities and limited financial resources continue to constrain the ability to make costly new investments to significantly expand the water system capacity, effective management of water use and loss levels is recognized to be the most cost-effective strategy to meet increasing demands.

An innovative solution to forecast water demand over the next 20 years was developed. Future water demand was forecasted based on historical demand time series, estimated population growth and per capita demand pattern over the next 20 years, while assuming the continuity of water use and supply trends and operational practices. Population was forecasted using an exponential smoothening space state model based on historical population data. The time series of per capita demand over the next 20 years was forecasted using an innovative autoregressive integrated moving average model. The total water demand over the next 20 years was then obtained by multiplying the forecasted time series of per capita demand and projected population. Other forecasting models were also developed to estimate the seasonality of total consumption for both residential and commercial service classes. The demand forecast also considered fire protection and regulatory requirements. The adequacy of the City of Regina’s storage and treatment capacity were assessed and compared to the forecasted demand over the next 20 years.

The resulting water demand forecast model will enable the development of defensible evidence-based plans to meet forecasted water demand and to gain deeper understanding of water consumption and supply trends in the City. The model will also help to justify planning decisions with regard to the system capacity and requirements for meeting future demand.