Water savings are critical because freshwater is a limited resource under increasing pressure from population growth, urbanization, and climate change. Conserving water helps ensure long-term supply, especially in drought-prone regions, and reduces the environmental impact of extracting and treating water. By lowering demand, it also helps preserve ecosystems, protect biodiversity, and minimize the strain on rivers, lakes, and aquifers.
Beyond environmental benefits, water conservation drives significant operational and economic gains. It reduces energy consumption tied to pumping and treating water, cuts infrastructure maintenance costs, and delays the need for costly system upgrades. For utilities, it boosts efficiency and leak detection; for consumers and businesses, it means lower bills and stronger sustainability performance.
The good news is Semtech’s LoRaWAN technology is playing a central role in a smart metering initiative that’s already delivering measurable environmental and operational results in the UK. In collaboration with Netmore Group, Yorkshire Water has deployed a network of smart water meters that are currently saving over 1.22 megaliters of water per day during the early rollout phase. The project is expected to scale to 1.3 million meters over the next five years.
The deployment uses a high-coverage, multi-layer network architecture to enable real-time insights into household and commercial water usage. Through this infrastructure, Yorkshire Water has already identified more than 1,000 customer-side leaks, with anticipated savings of up to 8 megaliters per day once the project is fully implemented.
“This collaboration between Yorkshire Water, Netmore Group, and Semtech demonstrates how our technology can create substantial real-world impact for utilities and their customers,” said Rémi Demerlé, director of ecosystem development at Semtech.
Netmore’s network design provides 90% dual gateway connectivity through a combination of tower sites, mid-layer gateways, and indoor coverage solutions—enabling millions of meter readings per day. These insights are used to reduce leakage, optimize consumption, and improve service reliability.
“Our robust network architecture provides Yorkshire Water with the reliability and coverage essential for this transformative project,” said Vadim Lyu, managing director UK at Netmore Group.
Key early results include:
- Over 1,000 customer-side leaks identified
- 1.22 megaliters in daily savings to date
- Projected 2-liter per person daily reduction in household water use
- Targeted 15% reduction in non-household demand by 2050
- Battery life of up to 15 years, significantly lowering maintenance cost
James Wilson, manager of smart metering delivery at Yorkshire Water, said the solution supports goals across leakage reduction, operational efficiency, customer experience, and carbon emissions.
As demand for smart infrastructure rises globally, this deployment offers a proof point in how low-power wide-area networks can support environmental goals while delivering operational value to utilities.
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Aside from his role as CEO of TMC and chairman of ITEXPO #TECHSUPERSHOW Feb 10-12, 2026, Rich Tehrani is CEO of RT Advisors and a Registered Representative (investment banker) with and offering securities through Four Points Capital Partners LLC (Four Points) (Member FINRA/SIPC). He handles capital/debt raises as well as M&A. RT Advisors is not owned by Four Points.
The above is not an endorsement or recommendation to buy/sell any security or sector mentioned. No companies mentioned above are current or past clients of RT Advisors.
The views and opinions expressed above are those of the participants. While believed to be reliable, the information has not been independently verified for accuracy. Any broad, general statements made herein are provided for context only and should not be construed as exhaustive or universally applicable.
Portions of this article may have been developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence, which may have contributed to ideation, content generation, factual review, or editing.
