Water conservation that stresses money saving, too

Years of historic drought conditions in California and elsewhere in the U.S. are prompting a lot of regional governments, as well as businesses and consumers, to rethink not only how they use water, but also how that water usage affects their bottom lines.

The ongoing drought has cost California's economically essential agricultural sector $1.5 billion in direct losses last year and more than 17,000 seasonal and part-time jobs.

Now, even amid hopes that the drought might break this year, the issue of sustainable water management has become a priority for the state's lawmakers. And while mandatory water restrictions are in effect in many California communities, some utilities are trying to educate their consumers about the financial and community benefits of saving water.

The San Francisco-based group WaterSmart says 35 U.S. water utilities, including several dozen in California, currently use its cloud-based customer engagement and data analytics to collect information and make consumers aware of just how much water they consume in comparison to their neighbors.

WaterSmart manages about 2 million residential water meters, or about 2 percent of the national total. But Jeff Lipton, the company's marketing director, said its system has helped to save about 900 million gallons of water nationally since first used commercially in early 2011.

Utilities using the WaterSmart system periodically send their customers a home water score, which compares the customer's water usage to similarly sized homes with a like number of occupants in their neighborhood.

"They're shown their use on a bar graph, relative to the average user in their cohort," Lipton told CBS MoneyWatch, "as compared to the most efficient user in their cohort, which is the top 20 percent in that group." They're also given information on ways they can improve their water efficiency.

The result is that many consumers voluntarily work to improve their water usage and lower their water bill, which in turn helps participating utilities by decreasing operational costs.

In late 2013, an independent evaluation of a year-long pilot project that used WaterSmart's water reports in about 10,000 homes in California's East Bay Municipal Utility District found the system helped improve water efficiency in the targeted homes by around 5 percent.

Lipton said water utilities are among the last bureaucratic bastions to incorporate the available new technologies to measure and better manage their resources. But given the pressures put on water supplies globally by issues such as climate change, population growth and underinvestment in infrastructure, he added, such systems are not only cost-efficient but perhaps essential.