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Meteosim leads a European project to improve energy costs and water efficiency in agricultural irrigation

By 9 de December de 2013November 18th, 2020No Comments
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Members of the consortium that will carry out the European project WEAMi. Photo: Meteosim.
 09.12.2013

Meteosim leads a European project to improve energy costs and water efficiency in agricultural irrigation

On 3 and 4 December, the official launch of the European project WEAM4i (Water and Irrigation Management for Advanced Energy) was held at the Parc Científic de Barcelona(PCB). The aim of the project is to improve the efficiency of water use and reduce the costs of power irrigation systems. The project, which will last three and a half years, has a budget of 7.6 M € and is co-funded by the European Union under the 7th Framework Program. The WEAM4i consortium is led by companies Meteosim, based in the PCB, and ADASA Sistemas, and is composed of 17 members from different fields - business, research, irrigation communities and public agencies and organizations - from five European countries Spain, Germany, Portugal, Holland and France.


The project addresses two of the priorities outlined by the European Innovation Partnership on Water an initiative of the European Commission (DG- Environment: ‘Water- Energy Nexus’ and ‘Decision Support Systems (DSS) and monitoring’.

On the one hand, it is planned to develop a smart network for the management of irrigation that will act interactively on the rational use of water and energy; that is, demand-based management able to optimize the available offer. In this way, irrigation systems will benefit from the water storage capacity of farming communities and will consume the energy they need when it is cheaper.

Furthermore, an integration model based on a service-oriented ICT platform will be used to obtain a prototype that allows applications to help in decision making related to irrigation at the field.

As part of the project, the results will be tested and evaluated practically in three regions of the European Union covering a wide range of crops, water resources and energy markets: Aragon (Spain), Lower Saxony (Germany) and Alentejo (Portugal).

“The implementation of the WEAM4i system will enable to obtain an estimated reduction of 5-6% in water use and 15% in the cost associated with energy” says Oriol de Tera, CEO of Meteosim.

“WEAM4i consortium members will benefit from the future commercialization of these results ” – adds Sergio del Campo, technical coordinator of the project on behalf of ADASA – ” and the farmers, in turn, may reduce the operating costs of their irrigation systems and improve the efficiency of water use: ‘more crop per drop’.