Building digital twins in clean tech - when water and electricity meet in a world with climate change
Digital twins for water, electricity and smart cities have become more than just a buzzword in the past couple of years. As we’ve discussed before, a “digital twin” of any system is when data from the system, whether through sensors, satellite imagery, drones, robots or SCADA systems, are integrated to form a digital representation of what the system looks like over time. While there have always been researchers in academia and the scientific community working on aspects of these systems, we have seen an explosion of interest across all sectors in the past couple of years. Some of that interest is due to Covid, of course. When the shutdowns happened across the world, a key question that was asked of all physical facilities, especially critical infrastructure like water treatment plants, wastewater plants and power plants, was to develop methods that would allow for remote monitoring of these systems. The answer to that question was a combination of sensor data, machine learning both f