Water Environment Research Foundation

Water Environment Research Foundation

Close: May 20, 2026

Identify and evaluate alternatives to water shutoffs for non-payment of bills, assessing their effectiveness and impact on utility financial sustainability and water service continuity. Assess the effectiveness of billing practices in helping keep customers from accruing debt that leads to shutoffs. Analyze how billing practices, penalties, and alternatives to shutoffs influence customer payment behavior, including timeliness, default, or participation in assistance programs, and how these effects vary across income levels and utility sizes. Evaluate the role of third-party resources in reducing arrearages and late payments and avoiding shutoffs. Develop case studies illustrating how utilities have implemented alternative strategies, highlighting their key hurdles and lessons learned. Applicants may request up to $200,000 in WRF funds for this project.

Water Environment Research Foundation

Close: May 20, 2026

Identify ways for utilities to overcome key barriers to the adoption of generative artificial intelligence (genai) and agentic ai, including actionable guardrails such as cybersecurity protocols, architectural design options, and redundancy requirements, that help ensure secure AI deployment. Identify a minimum of four genai pilot applications within the water/wastewater sector and implement each within two additional utilities. Document the transfer process, data governance and data quality requirements, operational insights, lessons learned on reproducibility, and early impacts of each demonstration. One application should focus on knowledge transfer and training. Catalogue agentic ai applications currently in use within the water/wastewater sector and capture key lessons learned and early impacts from each application. Reproduce a minimum of one low-effort agentic ai application at another utility and document the transfer process and lessons learned.

Water Environment Research Foundation

Close: Sep 14, 2024

To perform greenhouse gas (GHG) measurements using multiple techniques at the same time at two or more water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs) to inform the industry of the advantages and disadvantages of each technique.