The viable business ideas ranged from highly advanced water meters to de-icing wind turbines.
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The technology could also allow them to read power and water meters without entering customers' premises.
"Mundane" subjects such as water meters, job interviews and the internet have been stripped out, ministers said.
Howard Snowdon said fitting water meters helped cut demand but more must be done to change behaviour.
More than 100, 000 new "intelligent" water meters have been installed across southern England with work set to gather pace in the new year.
Installing water meters at a hundred of the local authority's main buildings have reduced emissions linked to water consumption by 51% since 2007-08.
If granted by the government, the firm would be the first in the UK to be able to impose water meters on its customers.
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Smith (water heaters), Badger Meter (water meters), Kohler (faucets and toilets), Siemens (water filtration), Veolia (sewage filtration) and Pentair (flow management and filtration).
In November the government announced an affordability study assessing the benefits available and the effect of switching to water meters, which could help people on low incomes.
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Dominic Bradley of the SDLP wanted to know why water meters were still being fitted to new homes if there were no plans for the introduction of water charges.
Water can be easily stored and consumers have less discretion over when they use it (for instance, people cannot defer going to the toilet, which uses more water than any other activity at home), so the case for smart water meters is weaker.
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Beijing has about 100 cubic meters of water available per person, well below the U.N. standard of 1, 000 cubic meters per person, a threshold used to measure chronic water shortage.
Without efficiency gains, agricultural water demand is expected to grow by 45 percent or an additional annual 1, 400 billion cubic meters of water per year by 2030.
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Finally, a new regulation on Water Resources Utilization will limit the annual consumption of water to 635 billion cubic meters by 2015, further increasing the need for water recycling facilities.
Damage from floods, which twice filled the first floor with about two meters of water, forced more repairs.
Extracting crude oil from deposits under 2, 000 meters of water is one of the most complex projects around.
The discovery is located about 140 km west of Stavanger, Norway, in a water depth of 112 meters.
Now Shell is falling behind BP in water depths exceeding 600 meters.
Getting at the oil can be tricky, and not just because it lies under as much as 9, 000 meters of water and rock.
It shoots water more than 150 meters into the air while lights flash and a recording of Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli provides dramatic accompaniment.
Most courses require at least 6, 500 cubic meters of water daily -- "that's equivalent to the water needs of 6, 000 Metro Manila residents, " says Flavier.
Divadlo Ta Fantastika, which stages multimedia and black-light shows in an Old Town basement not far from Charles Bridge, filled with about 3 meters of water.
For a few years, a company called Nordic Water Supply from Oslo, Norway, transported water in bags 200 meters long from Turkey to the northern coast of Cyprus.
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In 2007, the vast new Tupi field in Brazilian coastal waters was discovered in 200 meters of water below a massive layer of salt in hugely inhospitable geological conditions.
Currently, wind turbines are situated in relatively shallow water -- around 40 meters.
Washing water is piped down 700 meters (2, 300 feet) from the surface to the refuge once it has been heated by a solar-powered heater.
On the other are vegetable fields, several meters below the water level, and atop the dike sit a few shacks made of bamboo and plastic.
Since January 2012, UNESCO has been working in the drought-affected countries in the Horn of Africa to identify and to map groundwater resources for an aquifer that will provide at least 200, 000 cubic meters of renewable water every year.
During the visit to Wat Chaiwatthanaram, one of the most affected cultural remains in the Ayutthaya Historical Park, the Director General was informed about the damages caused by the heavy flood with water levels up to 3 meters in late 2011 and the main challenges for recovering damages at the monument.
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