It was the year that Wessex Water subsidiary GENeco revealed plans to roll out a fleet of ‘poo-powered’ buses in Bristol; Scottish Water opened the country’s first full-scale development centres for testing water and wastewater technologies; and United Utilities invested £3.5 million in what will be Europe’s largest floating solar power development.
Like the energy industry, the water sector faces a trilemma – maintaining security of supply while keeping bills low and lowering its carbon emissions – and they will need to innovate to solve it.
With the conclusion of PR14 at the end of last year, the water companies entered 2015 with a fresh set of price controls and Wessex Water director of strategy and new markets David Elliott says the water industry is “on the threshold of significant change”.
The Open Water programme, due to go live in April 2017, will make it easier for businesses to change their water suppliers, opening up the water and sewerage market to new companies and injecting a level of competition in line with modern energy markets.
But water companies aren’t willing to wait until then, with a raft of new innovations already underway.
As customer expectations grow and water companies are increasingly affected by climate change, over-reliance on current practices, procedures and funding streams will result in “greater risk and potential detriment” to the service provided to customers and the environment, Elliott says.
Utility Week looks at some of the great water innovations seen in 2015.
Southern Water: Thanet Groundwater Scheme
The problem: Southern Water owns a unique sewer network which was built a century ago beneath Ramsgate using chalk tunnels rather than trenches to house the pipes. This has proved problematic when it comes to conducting repairs and replacements.
The solution: Southern Water devised and implemented a system of sewer rehabilitation to repair 20km of sewers and 96 manholes. The firm found an innovative solution when adapting the cured-in-place pipe system, which allows a flexible composite liner to be pulled through a tunnel where it is inflated by compressed air. An ultra violet light train is then pulled through the liner to cure the UV-sensitive resin to create a new pipe lining.
This system has been used widely to repair existing pipes but the Southern Water team adapted it, designing a specially reinforced liner structurally capable of becoming the pipe itself.
Anglian Water: pollution-spotter planes
The problem: Tougher European legislation means beaches need to meet stricter criteria, or face having to put up signs warning people against going in the sea.
Anglian Water says it has spent more than £300 million fixing issues that were previously affecting bathing water quality. However, what remains are harder to pinpoint sources of pollution which are easy to overlook from the ground.
The solution: Anglian has started flying high-tech spotter planes along the Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire coastline, to spot sources of pollution that can harm rivers, estuaries and the sea and take hundreds of highly-detailed photographs.
Sources expected to be documented include: slurry from farms; animal waste from fields; sediment disturbed through river dredging; trade waste; and poorly maintained private cess pits and privately owned sewerage systems.
The firm hopes the photographic evidence from the camera will help persuade offenders to fix the problems.
Northumbrian Water: gas-to-grid
The problem: Northumbrian Water claims to be the only wastewater company in the UK to use all of its sludge remaining after sewage treatment to produce renewable electricity. However, the company also wanted to inject gas straight into the grid.
The solution: The water company is in the process of commissioning an £8 million gas-to-grid plant at the mouth of the Tyne, which has been built alongside its advanced anaerobic digestion (AAD) electricity generation process.
When fully commissioned the plant will deliver a £3 million annual efficiency, meaning Northumbrian Water will have some of the cheapest bills in the industry.
The AAD thermal hydrolysis process involves pre-treating the sludge remaining after sewage treatment, which releases methane. This is collected in biogas storage bags and burned in gas engines, a process which produces nearly 10MW electricity or being fed into the gas-to-grid process.
Waste heat and steam generated from the process are also captured and recycled for use elsewhere at the works.
The problem: The not-for-profit company currently generates around 11 per cent of its energy needs, but aims to increase this to 25 per cent by 2020. There is also an aim to reduce the amount of energy used on sites by 5 per cent within the next five years.
The solution: Welsh Water is investing in a £24 million project at Five Fords wastewater treatment works near Wrexham, where it will combine advanced anaerobic digestion, wind and solar generation, hydroelectric and gas to grid – a biogas upgrade plant. The renewable energy generated will be equivalent to that used in 5,000 homes.
Welsh Water believes this will be the first wastewater site of its kind in the UK and will help Welsh Water to reduce operating costs and lower customers’ bills.
Yorkshire Water: REVO technology
The problem: Yorkshire Water spends more than £50 million per year on electricity, of which 75 per cent is due to consumption during high tariff periods.
The solution: The firm developed technology which allows it to understand which assets require the most energy and plot their use around the times of day when they will be cheapest to run. The technology can identify which electricity tariffs will be most effective in reducing the company’s energy bill, and identify the most efficient assets to run.
The scheme has so far delivered savings for Yorkshire Water across 60 sites and is projected to save almost £1 million next year.
The company hopes to develop the commercial opportunities that the REVO software offers as it provides solutions to a number of industry-wide issues.