Kieran Brocklebank, head of innovation at United Utilities
United Utilities signed a framework agreement with Canadian start-up Emagin to roll out AI across its entire water network in the North West of England, after initial trials demonstrated energy savings of 22 per cent in pumping clean water from service reservoirs in the Oldham area.
Emagin was initially brought on board using a procurement process called Innovation Lab, earlier in the year. The process is run on competition lines with applicants set themes or problems to put forward solutions for. It can be difficult for utilities governed by EU procurement rules to bring in companies that have little track record and are sometimes not quite ready for market.
The Canadian firm applied under the Future of Water category. “That’s where, rather than describe one of our problems, we just say to the universe, ‘hey, what should a future water company look like? How should it work? What services should it offer?’”, explains Kieran Brocklebank, head of innovation at United Utilities.
“Emagin came to us with an offer that basically said, ‘we know all about artificial intelligence and water, what problems have you got?’”
Brocklebank says Emagin was put to work on coming up with a way for the company to move water around its network that balanced supply and demand while minimising energy use. “The task was how to predict demand and make sure we’ve always got enough water. How to move it around the region safely, so that it’s not dislodging and discolouring water, while at the same time, minimising our energy bill. It costs a lot of money to pump water round.”
Data crunching
Emagin’s AI platform, HARVI, can assess vast amounts of data on a wide range of factors such as weather, demand for water, pump performance and electricity prices. Data is collected from a wide range of sources, sensors, customer information, and even Twitter. It uses the information to produce a range of options for humans to select from to produce an accurate pumping schedule every 15 minutes, explains Brocklebank.
“We don’t want machines to take over everything. But we do want them to do all the heavy lifting really, the analysis. We want HARVI to recommend three or four different options that we can choose. And those options are based on how many risks you want to take. Do you want to make sure you’ve always got the service reservoirs fully stocked? Or do you want some to be just at the right level?”
Brocklebank explains: “In most water companies, this pump scheduling happens very infrequently. We probably do one schedule a day, for one area, which means it doesn’t really take into account what is happening throughout the day. So, we either plan a schedule that can’t really cope with unforeseen events, or we over cope by having far too much water.”
Brocklebank says the recommendations made by HARVI are monitored from head office. “The next step is that it automatically makes the choice itself and executes it, with humans just nudging it gently, or overseeing it once a week, or something like that.”
He says the company has saved 22 per cent on energy costs by optimising the amount of energy and time of use.
“We’ll make even more savings if we can get the system to automatically switch the pumps on and off. And as we trust the system, we can go for the ‘riskier’ options.”
The application of HARVI is the latest stage in UU’s “systems thinking”, which has seen the organisation invest millions of pounds over the years in getting the capability for remote monitoring and control and being able to run systems from the centre, which was praised by Ofwat in its PR19 review.
Bigger rollout
Brocklebank says UU is now finalising plans with Emagin to capitalise on the technology in the whole of the North West water network.
UU selected Oldham first because many of its assets could be remotely controlled.
“In terms of the ambitions we have for HARVI, we think this system is going to help us on our electricity consumption – it’s going to save us £10 million in direct cost savings from electricity,” he says.
Eventually, he muses, applications of the AI technology could be much wider: “Can it help us predict leakage, or manage systems to avoid discolouration? What about wastewater, or flooding events? What if we used the HARVI to take all these different inputs?
“We might find there are several AI systems running for us in the background, with one super AI controlling all of them. It’s not just the world of science fiction any more, it’s fact, and it’s with us right now and we’re taking advantage of it.”
Still a place for people
However, he is quick to add that this is not about substituting people with machines. “Often when you talk about AI, people’s minds jump to the negative aspects of over-reliance on machines, or thinking that all humans are going to be replaced. That isn’t where we’re wanting to take this obviously. We want to use AI like we use every tool that humans get access to.
“It’s brand new, it’s very disruptive, it’s changing our business processes, not just what IT systems we rely on. And so, we’re going at this in an assertive, but measured way. We’re trying to find the transactional tasks to give to the robots, but the smart decision-making is with humans.”
This interview first appeared in Flex, issue 3. Read the full issue of Flex here