At the Clean-Tech Investor Summit in Indian Wells, Calif., this week, Peter Gleick, co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute and one of Wired magazine’s 15 people President Obama should listen to, compared the global water situation to that of oil and said that a time of “peak water” might be coming. It’s not that the world will actually run out of water. After all, water is mostly a renewable resource. “[B]ut we may run out of the ecological value that the water provides,” Gleick said in a keynote speech Wednesday.

Water already has reached or exceeded peak ecological limits in many places around the world, he said, noting that 200 million people die of water-related diseases every year. And that is a risk, not only to people and to the environment, but also to industry. The risks to companies are “both real and growing,” he said, adding that very few companies don’t depend on water for something. Companies that use water to make everything from clothing or semiconductors face growing competition, especially from agriculture, which uses 80 percent of the water used by humans, he said.

That’s leading to higher costs and limits on water use in some markets, such as water-constrained Beijing, which stopped permitting new water-intensive businesses to set up around the city, he said. “If water is dirty, you need to pay to treat it up front, not to mention [cleaning it again] afterward to meet standards,” he said. “In the past, water has typically been thought of as a low-cost input to production – and it’s still low-cost in some areas – but that’s changing.”

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The eighth annual World Toilet Summit and Expo, which opens today in Macau, looks at how to provide affordable, environmentally friendly and basic access to sanitation. Forty percent of the world’s population — 2.5 billion people — do not have access to a hygienic toilet, according to the Singapore-based World Toilet Organization, and that leads to sewage flowing directly into waterways, affecting coastal and marine ecosystems and exposing millions of people to disease. The U.N., which has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation, says about 90 percent of sewage and 70 percent of industrial waste in developing countries are discharged, untreated, into waterways, often polluting the usable water supply.

At the summit, companies like Switzerland’s Geberit International will be on hand to show off the latest in sanitation technology, and this year’s conference features a Sustainable Sanitation Pavilion exhibiting the latest in low-water and waterless toilet systems. Some low-water toilets have a dual flush system, using a larger amount of water for solid waste and a smaller amount for urine. But the WTO believes advanced dry toilets could be the future of the technology.

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While we often write about startups aiming to help consumers monitor their energy consumption via the web, what about water consumption? Petaluma, Calif.-based startup HydroPoint Data Systems has a solution called WeatherTRAK that lets you control sprinkler systems across multiple properties from one web interface. Recently HydroPoint rolled out version 5.4 of its web-based interface, which allows users to monitor their irrigation systems with real-time feedback on field conditions, reducing the number of required site visits.

The system works by pulling data from 40,000 independently operated weather stations to create a high-resolution weather map that gives WeathTRAK information down to the square kilometer. Beyond merely measuring rainfall, the system figures out a given area’s evapotranspiration rate. That information is then transmitted to the field via cellular networks where smart irrigation hardware can decide if plants in the landscape needs more water.

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After eight years trying to convince Dallas that it could only keep watering its lawns in a drought if it would pipe in water from West Texas, everyone’s favorite billionaire T. Boone Pickens has officially put his water pipe dream on the back burner. Instead, Pickens is focusing on his Plan, which calls for a combination of wind and natural gas, hoping that an increase in energy generated by the former will free up the latter for natural-gas-fueled cars. In recent weeks, he has spent $58 million on ads touting wind power and been photographed shaking hands with every Democrat in the country (much to the chagrin of Fox News).

In the late ’90s, Pickens took advantage of a uniquely Texan law that allows the state’s residents to buy up underground water rights — whether they own the land on top or not. He bought up enough water rights to establish his little corner of the Ogallala Aquifer as a fresh water district, which would have allowed him to invoke eminent domain in order to build a giant water pipeline from West Texas to Dallas.

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The water industry is a dysfunctional train wreck with a business model that could have been invented in Pyongyang, said Christopher Gasson, Editor in Chief of Global Water Intelligence magazine, at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen show on Tuesday. (OK, we’re awake now). That might not be a great thing for the planet at the moment, but its makes for a lot of opportunities for startups with innovative technology, as well as investors that want to fund a very nascent market.

But with so many water needs — drinking, agriculture, manufacturing, energy production, waste management — how do you find ways to fund possible innovations? Here’s some tips from Gasson, who moderated an AlwaysOn GoingGreen panel made up by Virgin Green Fund Partner Anup jacob, Miox CEO Carlos Perea, and the CTO Siemens Water Technology Joe Zuback.

1). Scalable solar desalination: There’s a lot of sun in places where fresh water is needed, and using the heat of the sun to power desalinaiton is a natural fit. We need solar clean water solutions that are low cost and can be scaled up.

2). Cheap clean water for agriculture: We need low-cost means of dealing with salinity in the agricultural system. In irrigated lands, particularly in arid areas, salinity can threaten soil and crop production. Finding a low cost way to offer better solutions to irrigate crop lands and keep salinity low is needed.

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Today, Israeli water tech company AqWise, which uses a bio-based film to treat waste water, announced it has closed a $3.6 million round of financing. Israel’s venerable and growing water technology sector keeps offering more solutions for purification and treatment. The current round of financing came from existing investors, including AHMSA Steel Israel Ltd, Elron Electronic Industries and Israel Cleantech Ventures.

AqWise’s system is novel because it employs biological-based water treatment solutions that work in conjunction with traditional waste water systems, which use filtering and skimming systems, as well as chemicals like chlorine, to treat water. The setup, called the Attached Growth Airlift Reactor, circulates plastic biofilm-covered carriers, which look a bit like giant hair curlers, through waste water. The plant matter growing on the carriers’ large surface area pulls organic nutrients, especially carbon and nitrates, out of the waste without the use of filters or chemicals.

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Shai Agassi is primed to install half a million plug-in hybrid charging stations in Israel as part of his Project Better Place venture, but what will a fleet of grid-sucking PHEVs plug-in electrics do to the arid state’s water supply?

The thinking goes that if cars suddenly stopped burning oil and started pulling power off the grid, the grid would need to produce more power. The problem is that generating utility-scale power is usually a water-intensive venture. One recent study on the water costs of an American PHEV fleet estimates that while a gasoline-powered car requires about 18.9 gallons of water to go 30 miles, a PHEV would need 318 gallons of water to go the same distance. The reason is that large coal-fired and nuclear power plants — both major power sources for Israel and the U.S., alike — use a massive quantity of water.

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As the population rapidly grows in places like the American Southwest and the Middle East, the demand for clean water is spurring additional investments in water technologies. Earlier this year Orange County brought online a reverse osmosis water reclamation plant to clean sewage water, and the United Arab Emirates recently signed a contract with Veolia Water for a reverse osmosis desalination plant in Qidfa, Fujairah.

The $115 million contract with Veolia Water, a subsidiary of French Veolia Environnement (VE), is part of the F2 Independent Water and Power Project. The plant, scheduled to be completed by 2010, will desalinate 136,500 cubic meters per day. Additionally, the project will include a 2,000 megawatt power plant to power the energy intensive process of reverse osmosis, whereby salt water is forced through a membrane against the osmotic gradient, separating the water and the salts.

In the U.S., a large barrier to water technologies is an aging and insufficient infrastructure. Water transport is far more expensive than that of electricity: the EPA estimates the country will have to spend up to a trillion dollars to upgrade its water infrastructure over the next 20 years. Meanwhile, developing countries will have to start installing public water works. That is a huge opportunity for new water technologies to provide new, cheap sources of clean water.

Starting today, the Orange County Water District will put into operation the world’s largest sewer water treatment plant for reclaiming drinking water. The $481 million groundwater replenishment system will supplement the Southern California county’s potable water by processing some 70 million gallons of municipal sewage each day through the use of reverse osmosis, which involves forcing water through a semipermeable membrane to remove solutes.

This is the first potable water reuse program of its type in the U.S., according to the New York Times, but many other water-constrained cities have been considering such a technology for over a decade. The NYT reports that the Orange County plant has already had visitors from all over the world. While certainly not the sexiest of cleantech ventures, sewage water reclamation might prove necessary to save our valuable water resources.

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Today’s Wall Street Journal devotes a good part of its front page to the growing problem of air pollution produced by cargo ships, which are used to transport 90 percent of the world’s goods. The tonnage of goods sent by cargo ships has tripled since 1970, according to the Journal, and in 2005, pollution from shipping produced an estimated 27 percent of the world’s smog-causing emissions. Not only are the numbers staggering, but the solution is going to be very complicated.

We wrote about the opportunities for eco-shipping containers a few months ago. The source of most cargo ships’ pollution is their source of power — residual fuel oil, a.k.a. bunker fuel, which is about as dirty as they come. Bunker fuel is the “tar-like sludge” that remains after petroleum is refined. The heavy metal-laden goo is collected from the bottom of distillation towers that process crude, making it cheap for shippers — less than two-thirds the rate of marine-gas oil, according to the WSJ — and a boon for refiners, who can sell of their excess waste.

While this exchange works out nicely for those two parties, the losers in the deal are the rest of us. Environmental Science & Technology (the journal of the American Chemical Society), published a study this month that estimated air pollution from ships is causing 60,000 cardiopulmonary and lung-cancer-related deaths a year, chiefly along trade routes.

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