Jonathan Clement describes how Dutch water utility PWN developed breakthrough technologies by turning the Netherlands' extreme density and agricultural pollution into innovation drivers. PWN built the first large-scale ultrafiltration/reverse-osmosis plant in 1999 and a ceramic-membrane system that cuts costs by 90 percent. Public ownership helps when innovation solves real problems, but an "Athena" culture of expert autonomy and strategic partnerships with utilities like Singapore's PUB and Melbourne Water matters more than hierarchy.
Chapters
Okay. One of the things as I give my introduction here, we talk about innovation, but our company won the Water Innovator of the year award in 2013, which was 32 competitors. So we were singled out. Let's talk about the Netherlands, because to understand our innovation, the you have to understand the country that we're in. So we have 16 million people. And for those people that are from the U.S. you'll like this because it works out. 16 million people in 16,000 square miles. That's a person every square mile. It's a very densely populated country. And in fact, outside of Singapore, it's the most densely populated country in the world. We got 13 million pigs, 6 million cows, 90 million chickens and one disruptometer. So don't worry, PWN is way over here. It's the water supply company of North Holland. And we serve in this little northwestern part, which is really the end of the end of the delta. And you can see the brown area is our service area. And we serve the province of North Holland with a few exceptions because Amsterdam is a bit stubborn. But we serve this part of Holland which is really drawing water from the River Rhine, in this case the Isle Lake. And we have been forced to innovate because there's a saying we have that our water has passed through a German at least three times. That's part of living in the delta. But we also can complain about the French as well, because we used to have a salt treaty with the French until they broke it French. And that elevated our chloride levels very high. And they canceled the treaty and we had to come up with reverse osmosis treatment. We had to do that in order to meet our standards. And we developed the first large scale integrated UFRO plant in the world in 1999 in Amescar. There's a picture of it. Here is another one of our innovations that we developed. And this is all coming from a public utility. Keep in mind in 2004, that is then our prince, now our king, working with Dr. Pere Camp at our innovation here, which is UV hydrogen peroxide. That was the first UV hydrogen peroxide plant, advanced oxidation plant installed in the world. Quite proud of that. Well, we have all these accomplishments and this innovation was born out of being in the situation that you are being in a delta with highly polluted water. And it became very clear. Well, at the time, Nord, which is now another company, and Trojan were really. We worked together very closely with Trojan to work on that UV hydrogen peroxide. They were able to develop and, and really make great profits from the Technology. And then our board said, well, why don't we do that? Why don't we make money? But the problem is we're public utility, we're not allowed to do that. But they recognized that membranes and UV treatment were the fastest technologies growing in the world. And that gave us a very unique position. We're a daughter company of a worldwide prominent public water supply company. We develop technologies based upon cost and efficiency. We don't look out to the market and so say, oh, this would be nice for you and not be nice for you. We only do it because we need it and we'll use it. But if we need it and we use it, it's most likely that other people will too. We're not an operational company, we're not a privatizer, so we're not a threat. So we have these very unique advantages. And like I said, we develop technologies for our own problems. And what I think is intriguing about PWN is that they've been innovating for 90 years. They have a very long history of water treatment. So that worldwide reputation that was already there before we established PWN Technologies was very handy. I think the top factors, I don't have time to go through all of these, but I think it's very important that you have technologies that really change the game. We're not talking about marginal improvements of 10 or 20% in this market. Everybody is trying to develop water treatment technologies. And unless you can develop something that will literally shake everything upside down, you're unlikely to be successful. You have to have something that really works. But the profile of a water supply company are all of these things. But water supply company, it's not a culture conducive for innovation. There's the Apollo culture, which really talks about power from the top, rules, structure, safe. That's not what we want for innovation. We want an Athena culture. Power is from expertise, task and cultures. Innovation from adaptation require highly paid experts and need to provide freedom. You also have to bring in outside experts and people from not within the water industry because they're too conservative and they're not very good at branding. So you need to bring people in from companies like Apple, which we did, and you need to have geniuses like Per Camp, who has been innovating in the Netherlands for 35 years, ending soon. It's very important, is that you should invest in the R and D that goes around your technology. That's one of our biggest fames to claim. And client selection and focus very, very important here. We choose our clients very carefully. We choose like minded utilities such as PUB in Singapore, such as Southwest Water in England, such as San Jose in California, such as Melbourne Water. Very important to choose your clients, where you're going to do your business for ultimate success. We have to look at resilience that was already mentioned. And you have to, when we look at this, we're going well beyond this and basically we look at what Singapore has really invested a lot in this. It's important that governments Invest. They invested 5 million in developing the ceramic membrane technology. Our engineers went out to Japan and saw this ceramic membrane system and said, look at all that stainless steel, it's too expensive. Every ceramic membrane in one stainless steel vessel. And they said, oh, we just put 100 of them in one vessel. 90% savings. Not 10%. 90% improvement. And here is the plant in Singapore and can you believe this plant produces 3 million liters per day? That one vessel with 19 elements, 19 ceramic elements produces 3 million liters per day. That's compact technology. Those membranes will never break. They'll last indefinitely. And that's what game changing is all about. Thank you.
