With each new asset management period, UK utility companies have faced further commercial and regulatory demands. Tight margins mean they must fine tune every element for savings and environmental performance, reports Brian Attwood.
From the perspective of their head offices, the country’s various water utility firms might feel that each new asset management period is like a new notch on a belt that gets progressively tighter every five years.
With AMP7 now in its the second year, there is much work to be done in order to meet a swathe of Government demands relating to cleaner water, better service and environmental regulations.
This requires a workplace culture that responds with greater agility to potential problems – balancing everyday maintenance with crisis management, making autonomous decisions, inculcating a clearer idea of how to react to ever-changing compliance issues.
And there is no less need for prioritisation when it comes to the technology required to deliver successful outcomes. Innovations applied at scale can ensure considerable gains in efficiencies but they come – literally – at a price.
Water company telemetry systems generate thousands of alarms each day, with the risk of control rooms becoming overwhelmed and missing critical alerts ever present
Matthew Hawkridge, chief technology officer, Ovarro
Emphasis will be on investment in tools that provide greater speed of delivery; predicting events at an earlier stage and more precisely, locating problems sooner and harnessing the data around them in order to enhance prediction still further.
Sector regulator Ofwat has made the task of prioritising somewhat easier at least with its demand for a 16% reduction in UK water leaks by the culmination of AMP7 in 2025.
Alison King of CTS has outlined her company’s work with South East Water, utilising machine learning to analyse leak data – much of it derived from consumer sources.
Yorkshire Water meanwhile launched its own smart water network pilot in Sheffield, employing acoustic loggers, pressure loggers and flowmeters. The Cloud-based WinCan Web platform allows technicians to share video, images and information with colleagues and senior engineers across the network.
Nathan Clayton, a technical specialist at Yorkshire Water, says: “This technology allows our teams to share images and information with in-house specialists to use their expertise to identify the problem and find a solution, whether that be a blockage, a collapsed sewer or an issue in a difficult to access section of our network.”
Clarity is the watchword here, because having access to volumes of data that might have seemed inconceivable a few years previously has its potential downside, reminds Matthew Hawkridge, chief technology officer for Ovarro.
“Water company telemetry systems generate thousands of alarms each day, with the risk of control rooms becoming overwhelmed and missing critical alerts ever present.”
UK water utilities, he points out, receive between 40-60,000 alarms from SCADA systems per quarter, on average.
“If an alarm is not actioned and subsequently leads to an event, such as pollution or a tap water quality issue, there could be serious penalties from regulators, impacting on targets, performance league tables and customer satisfaction, and potentially leading to fines or prosecutions.”
Ovarro’s new Cloud-based, real-time AlarmVision dashboard [pictured], seeks to provide ‘situational awareness to effectively manage telemetry alarms’ – analysing alarms from a customer’s telemetry system.
Adds Hawkridge: “Dashboards give a measure of control over alarms, based on [two] key performance indicators and allow action to be taken to help operators maintain or gain control. The ability to gain real-time or backwards- looking analysis of how the control room is operating against both standards gives insight into whether the control room is at risk of missing critical alarms.”
Operators can also identify the root cause of the largest proportion of alarms being generated on their system. This allows clients to prioritise resources and obtain pattern analysis on when these alarms are occurring and to identify the most frequent and/or troublesome alarms.
Prediction is now being applied in other, fundamental ways, in answer to growing the sector’s growing environmental concerns. Dublin City University (DCU) is one of six British and Irish educational institutions involved in the Beyond 2020 scheme, researching new technologies to assess the impact of climate change on aquatic environments via measurement and monitoring.
With the aid of precision drive and motor specialist Maxon, a team led by Professor Fiona Regan, PhD student Joyce O’Grady and then director of the centre of research and enterprise in engineering (engCORE) at the Institute of Technology Carlow, Dr Nigel Kent, developed a sensor to detect and monitor low phosphate levels in real time.
To mix and measure the water sample and the reagent fluid, the team consulted Maxon to develop a centrifugal microfluidic disk that would act like a mobile lab, reducing contamination risk, delivering a faster turnaround for results and producing real-time data.
Kent, now DCU assistant professor in the school of mecha- nical and manufacturing engineering, states: “Industry 4.0 is finding its way into many different industries. The kind of system that Joyce is developing will be prevalent; autonomous sensors that you can leave out and get real-time feedback on the state of rivers or lakes.”
Dr Calum Preece, environment product manager for Elementar UK, agrees with the Environment Agency assertion that improvements to the UK water environment have discernibly plateaued in recent years.
High-profile transgressions, such as the record £90 million fine imposed on Southern Water for illegal discharges, have intensified demand for improvements to water quality.
Preserving water quality, enhancing wastewater management methods and combating pollution will be among the defining challenges facing the UK water sector in the coming years
Dr Calum Preece, environment product manager, Elementar UK
Elemental analysis methods, such as total organic carbon (TOC) and total bound nitrogen (TNb) analysis, are among the most important tools in the industry’s arsenal, having provided valuable insights for environmental, municipal, industrial and pharmaceutical water analysis for many years, points out Preece.
“As a means of ensuring water quality and purity, elemental analysis is second to none. TOC analysers can be configured for a wide range of desired sensitivity levels, and by assessing carbon concentrations within a water sample, potential impurities can be identified and reduced to trace levels. This allows for the creation of ultrapure water supplies,” he explains.
“With elemental analysis, water and wastewater companies can ensure that their water processes are delivering the required results, while government bodies can draw upon long-term trends to form the basis of regulatory action and interventions against industrial pollution.”
Modern analysers are flexible enough to analyse multiple elemental concentrations in a sample through a single process (allowing nitrogen, phosphorus and TOC levels to be measured simultaneously), thereby further improving the efficiency of the analytical process and providing results in a matter of minutes.
Identifying quality issues goes hand in hand with quality improvement, as does sustainable practice. For Chris King, industrial disinfection sales director at Evoqua Water Technologies, this is a process that, applied holistically, compounds the benefits in industry.
Water disinfection, he emphasises, is a critical component of many industrial applications – one that contributes to sustainability, security and safety.
“Cleaner water means more efficient heat exchange in the cooling and heating processes, some of the greatest uses of water in industrial operations. Furthermore, improved efficiency leads to lower utility bills, which is essential to help mitigate the impact of rising energy costs,” says King.
While cost reduction has long been a guiding principle, the recent supply chain issues raised by the Covid pandemic plus post-Brexit trading, have increased interest in on-site generation of disinfectant.
While bulk purchase of chemicals such as chlorine solutions offer effective disinfection, there are challenges in terms of costs, safe storage, degradation and supplier dependence, states King, that may be overcome by on-site electrochlorination.
Technology, such as the Evoqua OSEC system, provides on-site chemical generation for producing sodium hypochlorite through the electrolysis of a brine solution, with systems generating up to 907kgs of equivalent chlorine per day to disinfect process or wastewater.
“On-site generation improves security of supply, through eliminating dependence on commercial chemical suppliers. It therefore offers some security against potential supply chain delays,” adds King.
“This independence also has sustainability benefits, in that it reduces the carbon emissions of your supply chain [and reduces operating costs].”
International events such as COP26 have ensured the pressures for improvement are supra-national and likely to remain so, cautions Elementar’s Callum Preece, meaning demand for such innovations will only increase.
“Preserving water quality, enhancing wastewater management methods and combating pollution will be among the defining challenges facing the UK water sector in the coming years, especially as the international focus on environmental stewardship intensifies.”
