## 5 Implementation Challenges for the Smart Water Grid
### Economic Disincentives  
Water is a monopoly. While smart electrical grid holds promise to create new power markets, this is unlikely to happen for the smart water grid. Water resources are unlike smart electrical grids--the application of smart technology to create producer markets does not work for water, because water is a resource to be distributed (excepting desalinization) rather than something to be made (_i.e._, electricity) The general lack of incentives to innovate in utilities affects adoption of smart water grid technologies.  
For any investment in new technology, the benefits should outweigh the costs for those paying. With technology that increases resource efficiency, there is typically a threshold payback period or return on investment. Smaller utilities typically have less capital to invest and water utilities tend to be smaller scale than electricity utilities. For end-use, property renters that pay their own utility bills may have leases that are shorter than the payback period for investments. In cases where property owners' pay utility bills, property owners may make efficiency upgrades to decrease their utility bill or property owners may just pass on increased daily costs of inefficiency to renters in their monthly rent.  
An economic issue for both utilities and consumers is the cost and other negative effects of fixing leaks once they are found by a smart water grid. Distribution pipes are often underneath other infrastructure, so accessing leaks to repair involves removing and repairing this other infrastructure. Repair restricts use of those infrastructures, including roads, causing inconvenience to residents. At the home level, some leaks such as faucet leaks or toilet flapper leaks are easy to repair, but some are not. Leaks that occur underground or behind walls may require professional repair, which can be expensive and take many years to pay back to the consumer through lower water bills [26].  
Additionally, although the utility is most often responsible for paying for a smart water grid, many of the economic, sustainability, and resiliency benefits of a smart water grid are divided among actors beyond the utility. For example, an end-use smart meter helps the utility via automated meter reading and improved flow data, but also provides value to the end-user by informing efficiency actions. Another example is that a more secure water system benefits society as a whole, but from the perspective of the water utility, it is simply an additional cost.  
Water infrastructure changes slowly. Many system elements such as pipes, valves and meters last for decades. Barring changes in water regulations, keeping the existing system going can make sense when its components are expensive and long-lived. A smart water grid system needs to achieve a certain size scale to realize many of its benefits, _i.e._, the utility of a network increases with the number of nodes in the network. Incremental replacement of failed system elements with smart technology will not realize these size scale benefits. This scale issue is qualitatively different for newly developing areas installing water infrastructure for the first time. Newly developing communities and countries have opportunities that established ones do not.