Solving Water Through Digital Solutions in China and North Asia
“Digital technologies can create powerful water, energy and cost efficiencies, and make water systems and their communities more resilient and sustainable.”
Shuping Lu is President of Xylem China and North Asia – and a firm believer in the power of transformation.
At Xylem, we believe that if you can change water, you can change everything.
As the global economy expands, new pressures are put on limited resources. Rapid growth in recent years has coincided with the impact of climate change and aging infrastructure: the effects vary, and some communities are hit harder than others.
China is home to 20 percent of the world’s population, but only six percent of the world’s freshwater supply lies within its borders. Here we have an opportunity to accelerate the adoption of advanced technologies to make a real difference, creating a more water secure future for countless communities across the region.
As a global water technology company, our teams in China and across the world are working to help utilities, industrials and other users of water harness the power of innovation to create change all across the water cycle. Digital technologies can create powerful water, energy and cost efficiencies, and make water systems more resilient and sustainable.
One way that Xylem is helping drive innovation across the water sector is through our new Research & Development Centers in Shanghai and Nanjing, where we’re introducing advanced technologies and data analytics to develop integrated, customized solutions.
We have also created a dedicated Xylem Smart Water team that brings together smart water experts from across China and our global enterprise, and they all are focused on helping our customers tap into the power of digital solutions.
These offerings include our Intelligent Pump House solution, which is embedded with a water quality monitoring and security system, and UV disinfection system, and our Aquatalk smart water management cloud platform, which provides customers with the data, insights and analytical service they need to run their infrastructure more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Our teams use these technologies to help our customers solve the most complex water problems, and in a region as vast as China and North Asia, we’ve had the opportunity to work on some really unusual but important projects where we’ve had to think outside the box.
A great example of this is our work with the Drepung Monastery in Lhasa City, Tibet, which sits in the Gengpi Uzi mountains at almost four kilometers above sea level. For the past few decades, the monastery faced severe water supply issues. The 7,700 monks living there would have to collect fresh spring water, or water from the foot of the mountain during dry season, just to meet their daily water needs.
Our team developed an integrated and innovative solution for the monastery that included water supply and treatment units, smart leak detection monitoring systems and our Aquatalk software platform. By installing three water booster pump stations capable of lifting tons of water through a vertical height of 200 meters in high attitude, we were able to provide a safe water supply to meet their daily needs.
This technology also supported their fire protection system, which is critical for protecting the monastery’s ancient brick-wood structures.
I’m also inspired by our work to create social impact through our corporate social responsibility program Xylem Watermark. In recent years, we have helped more than 110 schools in rural areas by improving their drinking water facilities, giving 62,000 students and teachers access to safe drinking water.
I’ve been with Xylem for more than 25 years, and I’m so proud to work in a sector that is doing so much good for communities, and for the economy and the environment, and I’m so excited about the future. As we like to say, let’s solve water!
