‘National transformation’ needed to advance blue-green schemes

Customers will not be able to afford the extra costs of urgent improvements to meet required environmental and service standards.

That was the stark warning from one water company at the Utility Week Wastewater Conference last week in a discussion around implementing nature-based solutions alongside traditional engineered infrastructure.

Steve Wilson, managing director of wastewater services at Welsh Water, said delivering the huge environmental programme affordably was a huge challenge.

He said if the company followed a technically achievable approach to lower phosphorus levels in waterways near small sewage treatment works there was “no way customers are going to be able to afford to pay”.

Welsh Water is opting for “an alternative way” to deliver improved performance in the face of changing climate and more billpayers on social tariffs than ever before. This is through nature based solutions, which deliver multiple benefits and open opportunities for co-funding with partners including agricultural land owners.

Discussions over the two-day event, sponsored by Xylem, pivoted back to the mounting investment needs to meet environmental targets including phosphorus removal in waterways and to reduce reliance on combined sewer overflows (CSOs). These are anticipated to cost several multiples of previous environmental investment programmes and add considerably to business plans at PR24.

Wilson explained the board at the not-for-profit water company favoured blue-green solutions with multi-capital benefits and would not compromise on net zero targets, so schemes needed to work to those goals.

He said catchment solutions could offer customers better value by working with rural land users to minimise phosphorus and open up co-funding options but required flexibility to enable more experimental schemes.

“We need some help from regulators to make this happen,” Wilson said. “We need some experimental powers to trial some of these approaches and recognise that a wetland solution might take longer time to perform. We need to recognise that spending customers’ money on a catchment solution to get phosphorus out will be better for the long term and the quickest route to get rivers to the standards required.”

He said the approach could be applied to CSOs as well. “Spill numbers are an output, we should be focused on outcomes and the outcome is river water quality.”

John Russell, senior Ofwat director, added that the regulator was supportive of nature-based and catchment projects and “would love to see a lot more blue-green solutions”.

He stressed the benefit of partnership working but warned: “One of the big challenges is the time it takes to implement these things can butt up against compliance targets.”

Russell added that companies should waste no time in getting pilots up and running to prove the viability to then roll out.

He called for companies to work together rather than in isolation to prove the efficacy of pilots.

“Given the scale of wastewater improvements needed, this needs to be a national effort on a scale that has not been seen before,”  Russell said. “It’s a huge challenge so we need to do things differently and think more in collaboration.”

Rolling out novel infrastructure will require different players in the supply chain and raises questions about whether suppliers will be ready to fulfill water company business plans from 2025-30, Russell said. “The sector needs to think about this as national transformational change and have conversations with contractors about how to best achieve that. Simply relying on what is already out there to meet this scale of the challenge isn’t realistic.”