“Portugal has a perception of the value of poor water”
The vice president of AdP Valor, a company from Águas de Portugal, believes that the Portuguese do not value the importance of their water resources.
Nuno Brôco participated this Wednesday in a panel at the 20th anniversary conference of ADENE, the Portuguese energy agency, and said that the problem of efficiency in the country is not technological, but rather one of mentality.
“Today we are all awake to climate change, and we are doing well, but we have to be aware of the value of water. In Portugal a perception of the value of water is poorer. A few years ago I was in Mozambique and there the perception is superior, because it is scarcer. In other countries there is no such abundance”, he says.
The responsible for the public water company in Portugal therefore asks that “mechanisms to raise awareness among our population to avoid wasting water” be created.
The problem, he insists, is not a lack of technology, but a problem of mindset. “On the technical side, it’s not for lack of solutions. Lisbon is a world reference in terms of efficiency, with value losses below 10%. Technical solutions are available, our problems are not technological, they are of mentality. ”
And that is why, insists Nuno Brôco, that AdP Valor is committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2030. “ADP in 2019 consumed around 1.9% of the country’s energy consumption. It’s a huge responsibility. We took a giant step and in 2020 we launched plan Zero. We intend to be energy-neutral by 2030. It is not as easy to be concrete as to say”, he referred, elaborating that for this an investment of 370 million euros will be made in 10 years.
Rita Amaral, Lis-Water’s advisor, was also present at this third and last panel of the event and spoke of the importance of carrying out previous renovations. “It is essential to have a set of faster reforms, which will allow these measures to reduce waste and increase efficiency to be implemented. Since I joined this sector, people talk about this, but we continue with water loss numbers that insist on not going down. ”
“We need a strong water service regulator, we must not take away powers, as a protocol in the latest state budget. The regulator must be an engine of efficiency and innovation, which protects this generation and the future”, says Rita Amaral.
Benefits for water intelligence
The former mayor of Lisbon and currently a consultant in the water sector, António Carmona Rodrigues, agreed with Rita Amaral’s criticisms regarding the withdrawal of powers from the regulator and recommended the adoption of tax benefit measures for those who adopt water intelligence solutions .
“The water intelligence must also be translated into tax incentives, it is more tangible, fairer”, he says.
Carmona Rodrigues also praises technological advances saying that “there are more and more industries that can work in a closed cycle, treating the water, which can be reused in the circuit”, which translates into “cleaner rivers, less pollutant discharges, articulating the water treatment with the incorporation of renewable energy. ”
ONE conference 20 years of Energy, 20 years of ADENE it counts on the presence of several public and political personalities, including the Environment and Climate Action minister, João Matos Fernandes, the Deputy Secretary of State and Energy, João Galamba, António Costa Silva, responsible for the Recovery and Resilience Plan and others specialist and activists in the field of energy and sustainability.
ADENE is a public agency whose objective is to “promote and carry out activities of public interest in the energy area and its interfaces with other sectorial policies, in conjunction with other entities with basic attributions, and also promote and carry out activities of public interest in the areas of efficient use of water and energy efficiency in mobility”, as you can read on the website.
Its responsibilities include collaborating with energy efficiency policies, promoting projects in the area of energy and water efficiency, as well as clean energy and technologies.