Much of what information technology can do for the power grid, it can also do for water management. With the smart grid buildout, wireless sensor networks, software, and computing will be used to let utilities track energy use and identify problems in the network in close to real-time, delivering a more efficient grid that’s better equipped to handle renewable resources. According to a new report out from Lux Research, better information about water usage could save utilities money, make water management more efficient and provide one of the simplest solutions to the problem of water scarcity, which scientists have warned will be heightened in coming years by climate change and other factors, such as population growth.

As a result, the tide of water infotech is rising fast, and just as the smart grid buildout could be one of the largest creators of wealth in the decade, there are billions to be made in smarter water systems. Lux finds the market for water IT is set to grow to a $16.3 billion in 2020, up from just $530 million today.

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If you can efficiently separate tiny molecules of salt from seawater, you probably have the technology to filter out the larger bacteria, protozoan cysts, viruses and other contaminants floating around in much of the world’s freshwater. That’s part of what Richmond, Calif.-based NanOasis hopes will allow the company to not only provide tech for desalination projects in California, but also eventually sell into the market for water filtration systems in developing countries, the startup’s executives told me. “Water is a huge issue,” said NanOasis founder and President Christopher Kennedy. “Desalination is a starting point.”

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MicroMedia Filtration, a developer of advanced water treatment systems, said today that it has closed its first round of funding (no word on how much) from SAIL Venture Partners. The Lake Forest, Calif.-based company was founded in 2003 and is already shipping its treatment systems to municipalities and commercial clients. With its technology in place, MicroMedia plans to use the funding to “significantly expand its growth objectives” by adding to its management team and marketing plans, Ken Stedman, founder and president of MicroMedia, said in a statement.

Stedman didn’t give more details about what those new growth objectives might be, but the company is clear about the value proposition of its wastewater treatment technology. The company says its system operates on 80 percent less power, has as little as half the capital costs and is physically smaller (important for space-constrained real estate developers) than competing technologies. The filtration system is also modular, with individual systems treating between 250,000 and 1 million gallons per day, offering flexibility and the ability for clients to scale up as demand changes.

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It takes energy to treat and deliver water, and most of the time it takes water to create energy. This connection between water and energy has become clearer in recent months as IBM introduced its Smart Water offering (we know, we know, more “smart” tech), more U.S.-based desalination plants got the green light, and companies pushing water-related sensors, meters, and analytics testified before Congress.

Last week, the World Resources Institute issued a report examining the relationship between the two resources in greater detail, with a focus on the southeastern United States. WRI’s Eliot Metzger, a co-author of the study, told us that the stats they found in the southeast (two out of every three gallons of fresh water are used to produce energy, for example) can’t be extrapolated elsewhere, but provide a foundation for thinking about the role of water in all of the energy efficiency and smart grid talk going on right now.

“A really big part of it is education — people just don’t know that when they turn the faucet on, they’re using energy as well, not just water,” Metzger told us. Could that information be applied to the smart meter dashboards coming our way soon? “Absolutely, and it could really make a difference,” Metzger said. “I don’t know that water utilities are really ready yet for their own version of the smart grid, but if the smart electric grid provides a way for people to realize the connection between the two, that could be something.”

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Today, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar will hold a high-profile public hearing in San Francisco about the future of offshore oil drilling along America’s coastlines.

We have a choice. Invest in safe, renewable forms of ocean energy — including wind, wave, tidal and current power — that will help secure our future prosperity, create thousands of new jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Alternatively, we can continue to give tax breaks to oil companies that pollute our oceans and keep us locked in a carbon age.

The stakes are high. Oil companies are lining up to cash in on a Bush Administration proposal to offer petroleum development in 1.7 billion acres of formerly protected coastlines, including 136 million acres off the coast of California. This proposal represents a huge step backward. Our country has finally woken up to the need for a green energy future. Now we need to invest in the technology to make America the world leader in renewable energy.

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San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom welcomed a full house of Green IT entrepreneurs at GigaOM’s first-ever Green:Net conference by proclaiming: “If you have an idea, let me know. We are a laboratory for innovation.”

Newsom said his first environmental initiatives were fairly easy. “It didn’t take much more than a piece of paper and a pen and executive orders,” he said, to lower city emissions 6 percent below 1990 levels by last September. Now, things have gotten harder and more ambitious.

Newsom offered an impassioned rundown of San Francisco environmental accomplishments and projects since he took office:

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U.S. green building rating systems have so far largely failed to address renovations of existing homes, in particular so-called multifamily dwellings like apartment buildings. But that is set to change. We’ve learned that the Berkeley, Calif.-based nonprofit Build It Green has secured grants to expand its GreenPoint Rated system to include such larger residential buildings. Tenaya Asan, a Build It Green program manager, would neither disclose the value of the grants nor say where they came from, but she did say that the nonprofit plans to have the new multifamily rating system ready within a year.

Designers and builders alike should delight at the news. Green building rating systems are akin to report cards for structures, with higher grades given to those with the most green features, such as insulation, sustainable materials, and energy-efficient appliances. Though the industry is still in its infancy, developers and homeowners increasingly want greener buildings and many existing structures, especially in high-density areas like San Francisco, are considered multifamily dwellings. Industry watchers say buildings certified as green tend to be more valuable than their less-green peers, sell more quickly, and retain tenants longer.

Currently, Build It Green’s GreenPoint system covers only new single-family and multifamily homes and existing single-family homes. The largest U.S. green building rating system, LEED, managed by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council, has a residential remodeling program for existing homes that provides resources and tools for remodeling projects, but LEED does not yet have a rating system for existing homes. Build It Green’s system is primarily used in California, with about 70 cities statewide officially embracing their guidelines. The organization is, however, pushing to expand beyond the Golden State.

Information technology has brought benefits to industries as diverse as finance and food processing — now it’s coming to your local water utility. Tech-giant IBM on Monday will launch a water management system for utilities that it says will bring much-needed intelligence to the treatment and distribution of water. The system will automatically collect all sorts of important data — like water quality, pump rates, and water use at meters — analyze the data and then package it into easy-to-consume formats for water mangers to evaluate.

Cameron Brooks, IBM’s director of solutions and business development for IBM’s Big Green Innovations initiative, says the management system IS THE first TO bring together this type of information into one place and enable water managers to customize the system and make quick decisions.

Distributing water often relies on sprawling and diffuse systems, and water managers today regularly work with spotty knowledge about what is happening in their systems on a real-time basis. IBM’s management platform, which will depend on sensors to read and then transmit the data made from third-party vendors, will make water systems more robust and efficient, Mr. Brooks said. The data will help managers react to problems more quickly, reduce water loss, and implement conservation programs. That should also help drive down costs — treating and distributing water is a costly undertaking and consumes large amounts of energy. The less water you lose, the more you save on the electricity bill.

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The U.S. Senate is starting to look harder at the nexus between energy and water. Tomorrow, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on a bill introduced last week that would direct the Department of Energy to develop a roadmap for addressing the linkages between energy and water. The relationship between the two sources has been a growing concern among energy and water experts. Large amounts of water are needed to produce energy at power plants, and significant energy is used to treat and transport water to consumers. In other words, each is dependent on the other, but energy and water are rarely integrated in policy.

Peter Gleick, president of Oakland, calif.-based Pacific Insitute, a policy group, will testify before Congress tomorrow. According to excerpts of his planned testimony provided to Earth2Tech, Gleick will argue that considering energy and water together could offer substantial economic and environmental benefits.

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Cleantech investors have had trouble finding and funding efficient ways to make and manage clean water over the past few years, despite the fact that the water industry is “a dysfunctional train wreck” in need of some serious disruption, according to the Editor of Global Water Intelligence magazine. While funding for large clean power projects has dropped off as a result of the downturn, clean water investing (which at this point is largely early stage), appears to be staying afloat. Oasys Water, a startup that says it has developed a low-energy, low-cost way to produce clean water from sea and waste water, says this morning it has closed a $10 million Series A round of financing.

The funds come from some of the venture world’s most well-known investors on both coasts: Massachusetts-based Flagship Ventures and Advanced Technology Ventures, and Silicon Valley’s Draper Fisher Jurvetson (the fifth most active cleantech firm in 2008). Oasys says it will use the money to continue to develop its desalination and water treatment process, which it says can produce clean water at significantly lower pressure than traditional reverse osmosis methods. According to the company, that lower pressure means its system uses 90 percent less electricity and fuel to produce clean water compared to most systems.

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