Aquatech Announces Partnership with Pani Energy for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Advancement

Solving Water Scarcity with Artificial Intelligence: Aquatech International and Pani Energy Partner to Reduce the Energy Consumption of Seawater Desalination

Desalination has traditionally been viewed as a reliable though expensive means to produce fresh water in water scarce regions. Aquatech International, a global desalination leader, has partnered with Pani Energy, an artificial intelligence (AI) analytics solution provider for water applications, to reduce the energy and cost associated with desalination, thereby encouraging further adoption of desalination solutions and addressing water security issues.

The partnership aims to augment Aquatech’s proprietary LoWatt® membrane desalination process with Pani’s artificial intelligence platform to reduce the energy required for desalination to levels that have not been achievable using existing approaches.

LoWatt is a low-energy desalination process that integrates robust pretreatment, optimized reverse osmosis design, and a proprietary cleaning mechanism to deliver what is currently the lowest specific energy consumption of reverse osmosis-based desalination. LoWatt’s performance already betters the current industry standard and offers additional advantages, including higher reliability and better plant uptime, thus reducing the overall cost of desalination. The integration of Pani’s software solution will help Aquatech further lower its energy consumption and establish a new industry standard of 2.7 kWh per cubic meter (m3). Enabling this lower energy consumption is expected to increase the adoption of desalination in water-scarce regions.

Desalination plays a critical part in solving water security issues. Over 20,000 desalination facilities worldwide treat over 99 million m3 of water per day – which equals more than 26 billion US liquid gallons or almost 40,000 Olympic swimming pools – providing water for more than 300 million people globally. While many more water-scarce regions stand to benefit from desalination technologies, high energy requirements and costs have limited adoption, as energy alone can account for more than 50% of a desalination plant’s operating cost. Artificial intelligence technologies such as Pani’s AI Coach™ promise to bring greater efficiencies to current technologies, making desalination an affordable and robust option to meet the freshwater needs of many water-scarce regions around the globe.

“By leveraging existing data, systems, and people paired with machine learning techniques, current desalination technologies can be lifted to new standards of efficiency – making water less expensive to produce and delivering affordable, climate resilient water to people and communities in water-stressed regions,” said Pani CEO, Devesh Bharadwaj.

“With superior process design combined with advanced machine learning, Aquatech can provide a solution that reliably meets treatment goals while minimizing energy consumption and O&M requirements in real time. Aquatech is proud to welcome Pani as our official digital partner for LoWatt. This partnership enables us to better serve our customers and address the biggest pain points of desalination – energy consumption and biofouling,” noted Ravi Chidambaran, Aquatech’s Chief Operating Officer.