The Catalan Water Partnership receives final approval for 8 projects in the 2023 AEIs call

On November 29th, the Ministry of Industry and Tourism published the final resolution for this year’s call for the Program of Support to Innovative Business Groups (AEIs). Out of the 10 projects submitted, the Catalan Water Partnership received approval for 8, with 6 of them being led by the CWP itself.

All of these projects share a common focus on the application of digital technologies to address various challenges in the sector. Some of these challenges include improving treatment processes, such as the SurVue project, which aims to use artificial intelligence to reduce foam formation in bioreactors and decanters in wastewater treatment plants (EDARs), and AtmosphAIr 2.0, the second phase of a project with the same name, which aims to monitor and reduce the emission of odoriferous and greenhouse gases in treatment plants. In this call, digitalization in the water sector also serves as a lever for improving water cycle use and management among end users, such as in the tourism or cosmetics sectors. Two of the CWP’s AEI projects in this line are the second phase of SmartH2Otel 2.0, which promotes water savings and reuse in hotels, and the Cosme Water Footprint project, which encourages efficient use and control in cosmetic companies. Other sectors where CWP’s AEI projects are developed include the meat sector, through the VisceraCutting project led by the INNOVACC cluster, and the industrial sector through the SAGIC project, led by the Digital Cluster of Catalonia. The remaining two AEI projects from the 2023 call are ReWaT, which aims to develop a support tool for the design and implementation of urban reclaimed water networks, and the second phase of the SatWater 2.0 project, which develops a system for predicting quality loss events in surface water bodies.

The approved projects at the CWP represent a total budget of over 2 million euros, corresponding to a total grant of 1.5 million. Additionally, a total of 26 associated companies will participate, 21 of which are SMEs. Last year, the CWP managed 8 projects under this same call, further confirming the importance of digital transformation in the water sector and establishing digitalization as a key priority in CWP’s strategy.

Out of the total budget granted to more than 110 clusters in Spain, the Catalan Water Partnership has secured nearly 4% of the total budget assigned to Spain and 12.2% of the total for Catalonia.