Conroe, Texas, has experienced extraordinary population growth, surging from roughly 39,000 to more than 115,000 residents in just 20 years. It’s now among the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., ranked No. 1 in the burgeoning Houston metro area. This explosive growth strained Conroe’s water system, triggering a development moratorium and creating an urgent need to modernize aging water infrastructure while dramatically expanding capacity.
Schneider Electric partnered with the City of Conroe to deploy EcoStruxure Automation Expert (EAE), an open, software-defined automation platform, across all 19 of the city’s water and wastewater facilities as part of a $50-million infrastructure upgrade, the most ambitious in the city’s history. The project transformed a fragmented, manually operated water system into a unified, digitally managed network capable of serving Conroe’s rapidly growing population with 24/7 reliability. It’s a model for other cities, and worthy of recognition by POWER in the Water category of our annual Top Plant awards.
Before the modernization, Conroe’s water operations depended on customer complaints to flag service issues, and operators spent about five hours each day manually collecting data across facilities. With the system adding roughly 2,000 new water accounts per year, and summer irrigation accounting for more than 50% of the city’s total water use, Conroe’s legacy infrastructure could not keep pace. The vulnerability of the system was further underscored by the devastation of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which highlighted the critical need for built-in disaster recovery and remote operational capabilities.
Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Automation Expert represents a fundamentally different approach to water utility automation. Unlike proprietary, hardware-locked systems, EAE decouples software from hardware, enabling the city to deploy standardized, modular automation across all 19 of its facilities. The system was scaled from just four original plants to today’s 19 without the exponential engineering costs traditionally associated with such expansion. The platform, deployed alongside Modicon M262 Logic & Motion Controllers and Variable Speed Drives, enables secure remote monitoring, automated data collection, real-time alerting, and built-in cybersecurity with disaster recovery—transforming operations from reactive to proactive.
A key infrastructure component enabled by this modernization is the Silver Springs Bypass waterline project, a 1,550-foot, 16-inch pipeline from Water Plant 15 that delivers 1,200 gallons per minute to areas west of Interstate 45 and northeast Conroe, significantly strengthening the city’s distribution network. The automation platform also supports upcoming expansions including Water Plant No. 29 (1,500-gpm well with 1-million-gallon storage) and multiple new wells planned through 2026, ensuring the system can scale with continued growth.
The deployment has delivered quantifiable improvements across every dimension of Conroe’s water operations:
- 80% faster fault recovery time—Real-time alerting and remote diagnostics enable operators to detect and resolve issues before they impact customers, replacing the previous complaint-driven response model.
- 70% increase in engineering efficiency—Modular, reusable code and standardized controllers dramatically reduce the engineering effort required to bring new plants online.
- Daily data collection reduced from five hours to just minutes—Automated, centralized data collection frees operators to focus on optimization and preventive maintenance rather than manual rounds.
- New facility deployment accelerated from weeks to days—The standardized, software-defined architecture enabled the city to scale from four to 19 facilities at a pace that would have been impossible with conventional automation.
What makes the Conroe project especially noteworthy is its replicability. Thousands of small and mid-sized municipalities across the U.S. face the same convergence of aging infrastructure, population growth, and climate vulnerability. Conroe’s deployment demonstrates that open, software-defined automation is not limited to large metropolitan utilities—it can be adopted by growing cities of any size to achieve transformational improvements in water stewardship. The open architecture avoids vendor lock-in, allowing municipalities to integrate best-of-breed hardware and scale incrementally as budgets and demand require.
The initiative also advances Conroe’s broader goals around transparency and quality of life. Enhanced monitoring and system visibility allow the city to track performance in real time, identify and address issues before they affect residents, and maintain consistent, reliable water service delivery across a rapidly expanding community. Through this collaboration, Schneider Electric and the City of Conroe have created a blueprint for how municipalities can leverage innovative automation to modernize critical water infrastructure, reduce water loss, improve operational resilience, and build future-ready water systems capable of serving generations to come.
—POWER
