FlexiLingo
They Sold Water Plants for 25 Years. Now They Want Them Back! (w. Guillaume Clairet - H2O Innovation)
- Interview
H2O Innovation just bought back the first WaterHub: a sewer mining, water reuse plant on Emory University's campus in Atlanta, built by the team H2O later acquired, yet never owned by it. So why would a company that has sold more than a thousand water treatment systems start buying them back? Guillaume Clairet, COO of H2O Innovation, walks me through the deal. He calls it BBUOO: Buy Back, Upgrade, Own, Operate. And it's a lesson in the economics of owning a water utility asset: who pays for the plant, who owns it, who runs...
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Is this episode right for you?
B1 · Intermediate
Fine if you can follow simple news
- 82% of the words are B1 or easier.
- 191 words a minute: natural, fairly fast speech.
- 187 harder words (B2 and up) in the whole episode.
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The opening of the episode. The whole transcript is in the player.
harder words (B2+)
BBUOO, I did not just have a stroke, you just told me that term. Basically you're saying this sector misses acronyms and we needed one more. So here we go. Full credit to you.
That's me a few days ago with Guillaume Cleraire, the COO of H2O Innovation. And BBUOO is how he describes a deal H2O just closed. Buy back a water plant, upgrade it, own it and operate it. Now the plant in question is not just any plant.
sits on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta. And if you've ever seen it, you remember it, because it looks like a greenhouse. It's a water recycling plant, the very first of what H2 Innovation calls water hubs. It was built in 2015 by a developer called Sustainable Water, a team that then became Nextera in 2020 and then became part of H2O when they acquired Nextera in 2024.
That was the opening. The rest of the episode (36 min) is in the player: every word clickable, with translation, saved words and flashcards.
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