AI could help the water industry curb its thirst for energy

“We were looking for a system or a tool which can help us monitor the day-in, day-out operation of the plant, help us to optimize our performance,” recalls manufacturing lead Gupta, who is responsible for production and maintenance.

Early this year, the plant began working with a Canadian startup called Pani Energy, whose cloud-based artificial intelligence software helps water treatment facilities quickly boost their efficiency and save money. Gupta and his team now receive data on the plant’s operations in real time. “If any problem comes, we are getting the warnings and alarms,” he says. As a result, the team can make faster decisions.

So far with Pani, the plant has improved its energy use ratio (EUR)—the energy required to make a liter of beverage—by 3%. Its water use ratio (WUR), or water usage compared to beverage produced, has seen the same improvement. The plant also avoided damage to a water filtration membrane that would have cost $10,000 to replace, Gupta notes.

Next up: boosting WUR to 5%. “This will help us to improve our energy use ratio,” Gupta says. In 2024, the beverage company’s wastewater treatment plant will start using Pani too. “All the water processes, we are connecting to Pani so that we will have visibility.”

Decarbonizing the water industry is the overarching goal of Pani Energy, whose clients include industrial, municipal and desalinization plants, mostly in the Middle East and the United States. For 2032, the A.I.-powered company has set an ambitious target: reducing the sector’s annual greenhouse gas emissions by 510 megatons—1% of the global total.

CEO Devesh Bharadwaj cofounded Pani in 2017, when he was still an undergrad at the University of Victoria. Bharadwaj, who grew up in New Delhi, had started off studying biomedical engineering, hoping to make a difference by building…