Smart water: regulations affect industry

The water industry is undergoing something of a revolution.

After many years of focussing on capital investment to upgrade infrastructure, industry regulator Ofwat has moved to encouraging utilities to focus on operational expenditure.

For the current regulatory period, which runs from 2015 to 2020 and is called AMP6, water companies are being asked by Ofwat to focus their efforts on a concept called Totex.

Totex is encouraging companies to focus on the longer term

Anglain Water’s Andy Smith

Put simply, Totex stands for total expenditure, and requires water companies to shift their investment outlay from initial capital costs to total expenditure during the life of an asset.

As part of its focus on Totex, Ofwat is calling on water companies to consider innovative technologies that can make their assets both more efficient and last longer.

Coming as it does at a time when the cost of remote technology, handheld wireless devices and cloud computing are all rapidly falling in price, Ofwat has helped create the perfect environment for the UK water industry to quickly move to mass automation of its infrastructure.

Having already carried out some remote pressurisation pilot studies during the previous AMP5 period, Anglian Water has been something of an early adopter of remote control technology among its fellow utilities.

Following these successful pilot studies, the company in February this year announced that it was appointing Southampton-based i2O Water to upgrade its network with cloud-based monitoring software, remote control and fully automatic pressure management technologies.

During AMP6 Anglian has agreed to significantly cut leakage, aiming for no more than 172 million litres per day (Ml/d) by 2020, compared to 195Ml/d today.

The utility is also aiming to cut the time it takes to restore service in the event of an interruption from 19 to 12 minutes on average.

Significant financial incentives are in place for overachieving targets through Ofwat’s Gain Share Mechanism.

“To be fair I think Ofwat have played a blinder, and made us think differently and look at innovation,” says Anglian Water regional optimisation manager Andy Smith.

“We often get compared to oil & gas as an industry, but when it comes to investing in technology it’s the value of the product that determines how much you can invest: your payback on installing that system is a lot later for water than with oil & gas (because it is a more valuable product). However, now there’s Totex it opens it up because you are looking at the whole benefit across the life of the asset.”

Trials of i2O technology at Anglian Water have already demonstrated a 40% reduction in burst mains and a 35% reduction in leakage on average.

i2O’s pressure management system comprises data loggers that monitor pressure in the water distribution and remotely controlled pressure reducing valves or variable speed pumps.

This hardware is tied into a cloud-based monitoring application that can automatically adjust valves or pump outputs to keep the system pressure at the required level.

“Our system includes artificial intelligence that uses the data that the loggers have captured to learn the characteristics of a system to bring the pressures down as low as they can be,” says i2O chief technical officer Andrew Burrows.

“It’s a fine balance between trying to bring pressures down while also maintaining an effective level of service.”

Smith says that the automated managing of pressure levels within Anglian’s distribution network has not only helped reduce leakage and burst frequency, but has also helped moved Anglian towards a condition-based approach to maintenance.

“By scheduling remotely we don’t have to have people working on the highway,” he says.

“When you look at things like interruptions of supply you don’t have send someone out there.With this technology we can look at how a certain part of the system is performing, and even if it is delivering the pressure now, the system can learn to spot when things are changing to tell us we might have a failure in three or four months. It has started to inform the way we do maintenance.”

Burrows is hopeful that Ofwat’s focus on Totex over the next five year regulatory period will drive further take-up of his firm’s technology.

“In the UK the regulator does play a significant role in the buying decisions of utilities, and Totex should have a good effect,” he says.

“Totex is encouraging companies to focus on the longer term and Ofwat is allowing them to innovate in the way that they do that by providing a financial reward for outperforming targets. This combination gives a greater incentive to invest in innovation and sustainable solutions.”

While i2O’s pressure management system offers one innovative solution by combining existing hardware such as data loggers with sophisticated cloud-based software, another key step towards the creation of an automated water industry will be the introduction of new “smart” devices.

“Remote monitoring has been going on for donkey’s years but the information previously recordable has been very limited,” says ABB electromagnetic flow product manager Alan Hunt.

“Typically the measuring device sends a signal through to the logger, which then talks to telemetry system and then that talks to final information system. From an end-user perspective, if they lose a piece of information, they haven’t got a clue why the data has gone wrong. It could be a problem with the system or a device. To diagnose that they would have to deploy an expert into the field.”

The game-changer, says Hunt, is communication technology now being installed natively into the device.

To facilitate the use of communication technology, the water industry in 2011 agreed the Water Industry Telemetry Standard, a standardised communication protocol that enables certified instruments in the water industry to communicate over a standard communications infrastructure.

Although WITS has been implemented in data loggers, pressure loggers and intelligent RTUs, ABB’S AquaMaster 3 is the first electromagnetic flowmeter to feature integrated WITS protocol support.

ABB claims the inclusion of WITS technology within the AquaMaster will open up new possibilities for operation and maintenance.

These include the ability to pinpoint potential problems before they escalate, providing operators with the ability to deploy maintenance personnel only where and when necessary, improving asset performance and cutting the cost of ownership.

“If anything goes wrong, engineers back in the control room have the granularity to see not only what the problem is, but what will become a problem,” says Hunt.

He adds that the technology is enabling ABB’s client base to take much more cost-effective decisions around the information supplied by their instruments.

He says its is an exciting time to be involved with the water industry.

“I think we sit on a transition point with instrumentation for infrastructure systems of that nature in the water industry,” says Hunt.

“Looking at things in a Totex way makes the technology more affordable - upfront costs will be higher, but there are massive cost savings that require a degree of speculation to see those benefits which will pay you back after a year.”