Cleantech Group’s Water Innovation Summit, which was held last month at the Claremont Resort in Berkeley, CA, was an intimate, invite-only event.  While this unfortunately means that not everyone could make it, it also means we were able to conduct extremely focused and productive conversations around some of today’s hottest topics in water.  As an avid supporter of the Water industry, I thought it would be valuable to collect my thoughts and takeaways from the event in a whitepaper – “Water Innovation Summit: A Confluence of Minds.”  For those of you who missed the Summit, you can find the Executive Summary and a link to download the *free* whitepaper below.  In addition to providing an overview of the key Summit themes and events, I have attempted to include some personal and firm insight on the key issues in Water.

Executive Summary

• Innovation at a water utility is driven by (at least) 3 C’s: Cost, Crisis, and Cool.
  • While all three C’s are of significant importance to a utility, Crisis culled the most attention as growing populations force water providers to seek new sources of water.
  • Within these broad parameters lie a world of other innovation opportunities – emerging markets

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Since moving to San Francisco, I stopped keeping track of the seasons.  And every year, I don’t realize it is summer until I start receiving pictures from my friends back in Texas showing me the 100+ degree temperatures, as measured on their car dashboard.

Going hand in hand with the unbearable heat are the severe droughts that Texas has consistently experienced.  With no water to keep temperatures lower comes the problem of no water for people – period.  Last week, nearly 15 heat records were broken in Texas, and last year’s drought has been recorded as one of the worst ever.

Texas has long suffered from extreme droughts.  With no real indication of this being a “phase,” the state is ever more concerned with water scarcity, and is taking action.

The Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) is a funding agency focused on the long term planning for development of water resources in the state.  The way I see it, TWDB has been addressing water scarcity concerns in two of the most useful ways.  The first is the promotion of water reuse, which happens to be the largest focus area for the agency.  In fact, the agency recommends …

Aqwise, a fixed biofilm water and wastewater treatment solutions provider, raised $4.5 million in a financing round led by Triveni Engineering & Industries.  More recently, Epuramat, a provider of compact, energy-efficient and chemical-free wastewater treatment solutions, raised over $10 million in a Series B financing round.  These companies are ideal representatives of the stellar investment trends we’ve seen in water lately – not only because they successfully raised funding from the investor community, but because they both provide industrial wastewater treatment solutions.

Last week, Sheeraz Haji (CEO) and I led a webinar focused on the industrial wastewater market (watch a free replay here).  We kicked things off with a quick look at VC trends in water, which included a view of where money is actually going from a technology, application, and target user perspective.  In doing this analysis, I learned that over half (52%) of VC dollars in the first half of 2012 went to companies developing wastewater treatment solutions – more than I had suspected.  Digging deeper into the numbers, it was uncovered that most of these solutions were specifically tailored for industrial users.

The growing appeal of the industrial wastewater treatment market for entrepreneurs and …