ANALYSIS THE IMPACT OF URBAN RAINWATER HARVESTING SYSTEMS IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF WATER UTILITIES
Rainwater harvesting system, universal access to water, economic asssessment.
The Rainwater Harvesting Systems (RWHS) has been included in the New Legal Sanitation Framework approved in July 2020 as strategic alternative to reach universal water access. Despite the vast literature on assessing the feasibility of SAAC for households and establishments, there is lack of understanding on the impacts of this public initiative to water utilities. This work proposed and applied a methodology to evaluate the impact of RWHS dissemination on the performance of water utilities in the Federal District of Brazil. The methodology consisted of computing the potential water saving based on water balance of the RWHS for non-potable water demand, selecting and evaluating operational and economic indicators of the water utility performance and computing economic evaluation of different scenarios of RWHS dissemination. Results demonstrated that in most of the scenarios, the RWHS is not favorable to the water utility in terms of financial balance, mostly due to the loss of revenue given the reduction of water volume consumption. However, the financial balance has been improved by selling the saved water volume to other category of consumers, such as, commercial, industrial or public users. Additional consideration of environmental benefits of RWHS could also benefit the overall economic analysis of RWHS.