Smart water?

The UK water industry is now almost a year into its AMP5 asset management plan - an investment programme expected to generate industry-wide capital spending of around £19 billion over its five-year span.

Investment under AMP5, which runs between April 2010 and March 2015, will target many long-standing issues - many linked to EU Directives - in areas such as water quality, leakages and flooding.

The economic downturn and the emergence of new priorities, particularly those relating to energy and emissions has meant that investment priorities are still less well defined than in previous spending rounds.

Most of the planned spend traditionally takes place within the first three years. However, recent political and financing issues have led to some significant delays with year-one investment plans.

Suppliers, however, are now hopeful that current pressures will drive more higher-level investment by utilities, particularly in advanced control and automation, as well as intelligent device technologies.

Staying in control
“The economic downturn and the change of UK government has lead to fresh scrutiny of the way the industry is regulated,” said John Gooday, business leader for water and wastewater activities at Rockwell Automation. “There is more emphasis on minimising costs to the consumer and meeting environmental, energy management and CRC commitments.”

Despite their deep pockets, most water companies have been in the “stack-’em-high-and-sell-’em-cheap” camp when it comes to buying process systems and equipment. However, there appears to be an increased awareness of how the latest ’smart’ technologies can eliminate waste and reduce complexity and costs for maintenance, engineering and training across remote stations.

Use of internet-based communications and a single real-time software platform, for example, is gaining traction due to its ability to deliver the timely and accurate data needed to control many distant facilities.

Under AMP5, the main KPI requirement for water companies is to upgrade existing infrastructure to meet OFWAT regulations, or face high financial penalties for failing to meet the standards.

In this regard, Gooday said: “The best placed companies will be those with a progressive approach to integrated planning for real-time control, real-time energy usage and real-time systems and remote equipment management.”

Most water companies are upgrading their centralised telemetry systems in AMP5 towards this objective, said Gooday, whose company supplies control and automation products and systems to customers including Severn Trent, Yorkshire Water and Veolia Water.

“Their aim is to achieve real-time control by taking data from the plant and feeding it into their business management systems, outputting real-time optimised control,” said Gooday. “This is a significant step towards improvements in energy efficiency, asset optimisation and future sustainability.”

Current normal procedure in the water industry is to have a central control room with SCADA and PLC systems and a central telemetry system gathering data from remote treatment works sent, for example, by radio to control site.

“A lot of different systems have been installed over many years, so there are many differences between sites,” said Tony Druery, business development manager, SCADA, at Siemens Industry Automation and Drive Technologies.

This results in high costs for maintenance, training and engineering, said Druery, who cited one operator with 90 different sites running 19 different SCADA products on eight different operating systems. Such arrangements, he said, tends to create ’islands of information’ at each treatment site.

This makes the consistency of data a major problem for the utilities as the information is not accurate or timely, so central control disregards some of the data as unreliable, noted the Siemens expert.

Commercial reality
“The water industry is struggling with this problem at the moment,” said Druery. “[Companies] want to be able to monitor and control from central office, for example, to turn hundreds of pumps ’on’ and ’off’ from hundreds of miles away, through having a single system for all sites.

“But commercial reality is that they can’t just rip everything out, they need to change over time.”

Druery said UK water utility companies are now either evaluating or investing in projects to combine the traditional two-part architecture of local HMI and remote telemetry into a single integrated “distributed SCADA” system.

Meanwhile, the industry faces immediate pressure to adopt better monitoring and reporting procedures to meet OFWAT objectives: AMP5, for example, has more stringent KPIs for wastewater discharge requirements than AMP4.

Water companies have regulatory drivers to produce 15% of their own energy usage from AMP5. This energy might come from waste products, combined heat and power systems or wind and renewable energy production.

Energy efficiency is now established as one of the top five KPIs, added Gooday, who sees automation technology as essential to improving energy efficiency and best practice in this area.

“For many companies, [energy efficiency] ranks fifth - making it a high priority, though it has lost momentum compared with renewables and infrastructure requirements,” he commented.

Another major consideration is the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme - despite recent changes following the UK government’s comprehensive spending review.

The main operating cost in the water industry is around the operation of pumps, drives and motors. This equipment today features advanced technologies, such as intelligent motor control, soft starts or variable-frequency drives.

“Such systems provide more informed and accurate control by including power monitoring and condition-based monitoring in the system,” said Gooday.

“This can be a better solution to asset management - predictive maintenance and real-time usage details can help reduce operational expenditure, particularly for remote equipment. Accurate energy management across the whole water company can help identify and implement best practices and directly reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint.”