Benidorm opts for European aid to develop a project to digitize the water cycle promoted by Hidraqua in the Marina Baixa

Benidorm City Council is going to participate together with the concessionaire company of the Integrated Water Cycle, Hidraqua, in a call for European aid aimed at financing projects to improve the efficiency of the urban water cycle within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience (PERTE). This plan is financed with European Next Generation funds, for which a total amount of 1,000 million euros has been budgeted. The mayor of the city, Toni Pérez, participated this Monday at the Dinapsis headquarters in the presentation of the project, called 'Digitalization of the water cycle in the Marina Baixa. Vida Marina Baixa', with which Hidraqua participates in the second of the three calls planned in this PERTE, each of them endowed with 200 million euros. Representatives of the concessionaire and mayors and councillors of the other municipalities in the region in which it will be developed have also attended: La Vila Joiosa, l'Alfàs del Pi, Finestrat, Polop and Orxeta.

In this act, Toni Pérez regretted that the call for this aid comes “relatively late with the rest of the funds in the recovery plans” because, since they were launched in 2022, “there has been a lot of fighting so that there would be a PERTE of the water.” This demand has had “a great positioning on the part of the Federation of Municipalities and Provinces, especially the Tourism Commission because we understood that water was one of the great solutions where these recovery funds were a lever, an important impetus for many municipalities,” as he stated.

The first mayor of Benidorm has also highlighted that the 'Vida Marina Baixa' project, "with the six town councils it encompasses, will reach a registered population that exceeds 140,000 inhabitants" after which he has also defended the actions to be developed, “they will go much further”, also reaching populations whose municipalities do not participate in the project.

“What we do with the water in one of our territories will be freeing resources and making them available to another municipality, because water in the Marina Baixa has always been shared and has always been life,” he said. For this reason, Toni Pérez has highlighted that “few investments will be as important to redistribute wealth in a territory, wealth in a way of life, than those we make in water.”

This statement has also been defended by the manager of Hidraqua in Benidorm, Ciriaco Clemente, the company that will be the beneficiary of the subsidy if selected and the one in charge of executing the project. “Any drop of water that is saved in Finestrat or Polop is a drop that is in Guadalest or Amadorio,” said Clemente, before explaining the importance of improving the digitalization of the network to make it “much more efficient.”

Planned actions

The 'Vida Marina Baixa' project envisages a total of 145 actions in the six municipalities of the region, all of them budgeted at almost 10.6 million euros with VAT included. The investments are divided into three axes: planning; efficiency improvements and digitalization; and information management; and they will be developed and distributed according to the population of each of the participating municipalities. If chosen in this call, the project would begin development in June 2024 and would have an execution period of a year and a half, with a scheduled completion date of December 2025.

As regards Benidorm, a total of 35 eligible actions are planned, with a budget allocation of 3,176,514 euros financed from the subsidy, while another 769,310 euros would be financed with own funds.

Some of the actions that are planned to be carried out, and that are included in a proposal approved in the last municipal plenary session, are the preparation of a Comprehensive Sanitation Management Plan; a Regenerated Water Master Plan; the drafting of the Study for the Diagnosis, Control and Management of structural leaks; a Study of the use of groundwater and other alternative uses; the Benidorm Supply Master Plan; the implementation of the digital twin at the Benidorm DWTP; the modelling of urban basins, sewage and stormwater networks or supply networks; the digitalization and monitoring of the quality of the water network in tanks, the supply network, the sewage network, the medium relief points or leaks in the network; the implementation of new remote reading meters; among other.

The Councilor for the Water Cycle, José Ramón González de Zárate, has highlighted the “fundamental importance” of attending this call for European aid “to continue advancing in the improvement of the comprehensive water cycle” and has stressed that one of the objectives of the goal is to “increase efficiency in the use of water resources, something in which Benidorm is already a reference, but we want to continue improving.”

Finally, the mayor highlighted that the actions included in the project seek to “advance the knowledge of the integral water cycle, considering it as a vector to form a model of a smart, sustainable and social municipality that advances its resilience through digitalization. ”. “With these investments,” González de Zárate continued, “we will be able to very quickly and effectively identify any loss or incident that may occur and provide a solution in the shortest time possible, thereby increasing efficiency, which in Benidorm is 96%. % is even higher.”