The Problem
Half a century old and still in the ground
America has 2.2 million miles of water pipes. Most were built in the 1950s and 60s, long past their design life. A 2023 study found 20% of U.S. water pipes have already exceeded their useful life without replacement, up from just 8% in 2012, a $452 billion funding shortfall that's been quietly deferred for decades.
Small and very small utilities, the ones serving most American communities, report water losses above 20% of total supply on average. Some lose 40%.
The solutions exist: acoustic sensors, satellite leak detection, smart metering, targeted pipe replacement. The problem is nobody holds utilities accountable for using them.
The Transparency Gap
Your utility has a grade. You just can't see it.
Utilities are required by law to file annual water audit reports with state regulators. The data on how much water every utility loses already exists. It's just buried in government PDFs, inconsistently formatted, and completely inaccessible to the ratepayers who fund the system.
Consumers get shamed for taking long showers. Utilities lose 40% of the water before it reaches the meter. And the people paying for it have no idea.
Project Watershed pulls that data, standardizes it, grades every utility A through F, and puts it where ratepayers and their representatives can actually see it.
Timing
Four forces converging right now
Infrastructure funding without accountability
The bipartisan infrastructure law allocated $55 billion for water infrastructure. Billions sit undeployed because small utilities face no public pressure to access it and lack the capacity to try.
Aging systems at the breaking point
20% of U.S. water pipes have exceeded their useful life. The replacement wave can no longer be deferred.
New demand on broken systems
AI data centers are driving unprecedented new water demand. Western water scarcity is intensifying. Florida's public water demand is projected to grow 22% by 2040. Systems already losing 40% of their supply cannot absorb this pressure.
The transparency gap is newly fillable
States like California, Georgia, Indiana, and Texas are standardizing water loss reporting. New Jersey already operates Jersey WaterCheck. The data infrastructure is emerging. The consumer-facing accountability layer does not yet exist. That's what we're building.