Benchmarking for Energy & Efficiency Savings in the Water Industry
26 Oct 2009
The water companies in England & Wales have been privatised for some time, they operate under licences from the Government and are regulated by the Office of The Water Regulator, OFWAT. OFWAT has a periodic process for determining the prices which the water companies can charge their customers. The current round of price determinations is coming to a close just as the economy is suffering a severe downturn. Price determinations are expected to be tough and many water companies are looking to operational improvements as a way to achieve considerable cost savings.
This case study describes how one of the water companies in England & Wales carried out a benchmarking study to assess not only the potential that existed for cost savings but also the good practices which would achieve them.
OFWAT regularly benchmarks all of the water companies, therefore it was decided to extend the scope of the benchmarking beyond water to include other process industries such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals and oil & gas as well as transport and logistics. The focus of the benchmarking was on the main cost drivers for operational improvement: energy, chemicals, labour and transport.
Considerable scope for operational improvement and cost savings was identified by the study: energy & chemicals, 20%; labour 15%; and transport 10%. Improvement recommendations included:
• Regular efficiency studies of big energy users such as waste & supply pumping systems, air blowers and compressors
• Routine monitoring of thermal efficiency of combined heat and power plants
• Continuous power and run-time monitoring of large pumping systems
• Proper tuning of existing control schemes
• Feed forward control to minimise the effect of disturbances to the treatment process
• Progressive loading of parallel pumps and compressors / blowers to improve efficiency
• Increased use of statistical process control to trigger required visits to remote sites
The next step will be to carry out mass and energy balances for all of the major supply and waste sites and then use these in conjunction with pinch technology to determine minimum targets for energy and chemicals usage.
None of these improvement recommendations will come as any great surprise to process engineers reading this article and that is an important point to come out of the benchmarking study. Historically the water industry has recruited many civil and mechanical engineers. However, as treatment standards have been increased, water treatment plant has become very complex using highly sophisticated control systems. There is now a need for increased process engineering skills to ensure that operational excellence is achieved and costs are minimised in these tough economic times.
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