By Ramoncito Fernandez
Maynilad is the largest water service provider in the Philippines in terms of customer base. We serve over 9 million people within 17 cities and municipalities in Metro Manila.
I have been listening to the talks since yesterday, and the discussions highlighted the need for innovative approaches to addressing emerging challenges in the industry. These are the very same challenges that Maynilad faces, and I believe that these are the imperatives for the water sector in the future:
First, water security: Where to get a sustainable alternative water source to meet growing demand?
Second, urbanization: Population growth and the infrastructure boom are taking away space for new facilities.
Third, efficiency: How to increase or sustain efficiency levels in the face of unpredictability?
I appreciate the focus that the conference has given to these pressing issues. I think what is left for me to do now is to chime in with the things that we are doing in Maynilad.
Last year, we launched a corporate transformation strategy called “Maynilad next generation.” There are many facets to the challenge of building a sustainable and resilient future. “Maynilad next generation” connects and aligns these by organizing them into a three-point strategy of operational efficiency, business growth and organizational capability.
To enhance our operational efficiency, Maynilad is investing in technology. We’ve come a long way from managing pre-war pipes to remotely monitoring facilities from a central control room. Most of our assets—from plants to pipes—have been geotagged and can be monitored from a webmap. These tools have enabled our field personnel to work more efficiently, and respond to supply issues more promptly.
Even as we invest in technology, we also invest in our people. We have institutionalized a competency assessment program so we can tailor training interventions with our employees’ needs. We recently admitted our biggest batch of new engineering graduates under our cadetship program.
We also have a new integrated asset management team. Their job is to make sure assets perform optimally throughout their lifecycle, leading to reduced operating costs and improved enterprise-wide efficiency.
We also institutionalized energy management in Maynilad. Conscious efforts to reduce power consumption enabled us to generate energy savings and decrease our greenhouse gas emission intensity through simple process changes—despite continued service expansion.
Meanwhile, rapid urbanization presents another roadblock to the improvement of our service levels. In an ideal world, we would have huge impounding reservoirs to store water when and where it is abundant, and build conveyances leading to areas where the water resource is needed. Unfortunately, this is impossible given the lack of available land on which to build such infrastructure.
This is of particular concern to Maynilad because our concession area is densely populated, and there is simply no space to build huge water facilities. Yet servicing a growing population requires it.
Our solution was to develop distributed water sources—smaller reservoirs spread out in different locations. This strategy has enabled us to expand service coverage despite the lack of real estate. At the same time, having many reservoirs in various locations will allow us to continue providing water in case of contained disasters, such as earthquakes.
Finally, there is the challenge of water security. In recent years, climate change has been tough on our business. The Philippines lies on the typhoon path, so we expect an average of 20 typhoons in a year, concentrated between June and October.
But in recent years, we have seen major typhoons outside of the June-to-October season, as well as prolonged dry spells during summer. Unpredictable and extreme weather conditions have resulted in two major issues: First, low water supply; second, increased turbidity.
Ninety-seven percent of Metro Manila’s water supply comes from one source—the Angat Dam. So you can just imagine the supply risk that we face.
In years past, this risk has turned into actual crisis situations. We have since approached this issue with medium-term solutions, including the upgrade and retrofitting our treatment plants so that these can handle extreme turbidity levels. We are also building a new treatment plant to increase our production, additional reservoirs to boost our storage capacity, and pumping stations for better supply management.
In the end, however, these are just stop-gap measures. We know that we need to do something toward increasing raw water supply.
In 2010, we began tapping Laguna Lake for this purpose. Our treatment facility here yields 150 million liters of potable water per day, and serves our customers in the southern part of our concession.
Meanwhile, the Kaliwa dam project of the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System was approved by the government back in 2014. The project is targeted for completion by 2023. Once completed, it will provide 600 mld of additional raw water for Metro Manila.
While we wait for this major water source to come on stream, we are already looking at the possibility of building another treatment facility to draw water from Laguna Lake. Likewise, we have been exploring other options—including desalination, reverse osmosis, and mobile treatment plants—to further boost our production.
We are also starting a shift in perspective from linear to circular economy. Our practice has been to get raw water, treat it, distribute it, collect the wastewater, treat it, and release it. Now, we are exploring the possibility of reusing the effluent so it goes back into the cycle.
You can’t get more sustainable than that.
We see this coming in the near future. After all, there is technology available to treat all types of water! The only question is, “at what cost?”
These technological developments excite us at Maynilad, because all these are shaping up to be viable solutions to our supply issues.
In Maynilad, we have put more resources on three things:
Risk readiness: We are trying to approximate crisis situations and their triggers. And as best as we can, we are also trying to crisis-proof our operations.
Agility: We need to be able to move and make informed decisions quickly, to avert impending crises, or to contain current crisis situations.
Resiliency: Following a disaster, we need to be able to bounce, as fast as we can.
And we have tried to do all of these in the most practical and cost-efficient ways. As players in the water industry, we need to realize that the challenges that we are facing are bigger than us, individually. Sustainable solutions to these problems may require putting our heads—if not our resources—together.
Ramoncito S. Fernandez is the president of the Maynilad Water Services Inc. He delivered this speech during the International Water Week forum in Singapore.