The UK water industry faces the greatest period of disruption since privatisation. Within the next 5-10 years, significant change is set to hit it in multiple areas, bringing both challenge and opportunity.
Confronted with climate change, population growth, the need for increasing resilience, and ever rising customer expectations, utility companies also have to maintain an affordable service and public trust. All of this can be impacted by digital technologies.
The digitisation of water
New digital technologies are enabling water utilities to extract greater information and efficiencies from legacy water infrastructure to enhance decision-making, promote conservation, build twenty-first century infrastructure, and, perhaps most importantly, increase the value and benefits of the network.
The lessons learned from the digitisation of other sectors such as heavy industry, manufacturing and power are now being successfully applied to water infrastructure and commercial projects. According to our latest research – The Digital Utility Plant: Unlocking value from the digitisation of production – 33 per cent of UK utility companies have a digital plant initiative in flight, while a further 33 per cent have a digital initiative plan already in place.
‘Digital plant’ concepts in water
Digital utility plants leverage a large number of applications across the production value chain. These combine multiple technologies to address a specific business requirement.
For example, predictive maintenance, which combines Industrial IoT (IIOT), big data, and artificial intelligence, is a popular digital application for improving productivity and reliability by minimising unplanned downtime.
Applications of digital plant in the water industry
Intelligent networks
A proactive and predictive understanding of the behaviour of network infrastructure has been a long-sought goal within the industry – and one that is increasingly incentivised by the ODI measures brought out by Ofwat in the last price determination. Despite rapid technological advances in sensors and acoustics, however, the industry is still heavily reliant upon customer-generated information to be the first signal of network failure.
At its heart, the issue of network control and intelligent operational understanding is driven by the previous lack of connection between operational technology (OT) and IT; by integrating these traditionally separate technologies and changing the interaction between the two functions regarding network monitoring, the opportunities are significant.
A more intelligent network, with more connected sensors and devices, gives a richer level of data, which in turn supports richer analytics and greater insight. With leakage, waste water flooding and pollution incidents all carrying significant financial and reputational burdens, this is a key priority.
Smart analytics and smart leakage management
With 20-30 per cent of UK water production lost to leakage, leakage detection still relies on people and listening technology.
This is where predictive maintenance, machine learning and digital communication can change things.
By scheduling maintenance based on predictive analytics, instead of just the age of the infrastructure, water companies can achieve their economic levels of leakage whilst replacing fewer pipes. Meanwhile, next generation machine learning tooling and algorithms can drive insight-led interventions targeted at driving value. Further data visualisation and conceptual aggregation provides actionable, intuitive operational intelligence aiding both the operational teams but also providing improved customer interactions.
Digitally connected engineer
We see the development over the next 5-10 years of a truly connected workforce with real-time access to knowledge and information about critical assets.
Workforce scheduling will be more dynamic and intelligent, taking feeds from analytics engines and predictive asset behaviour models to get to the issues ahead of failure or customer impact. We envisage a world where an engineer will be equipped with technology that can bring live data feeds into their wearable or mobile device, use augmented reality to render 3D models of assets for maintenance and deliver instructions on how to carry out the work from a remote engineer seeing it through a live video.
Predictive asset maintenance
There will continue to be rapid innovation in analytics platforms, which will combine with machine learning capabilities and be operated in the cloud to deal with the volumes of data.
Increasingly, the analytics will be paired with widespread use of advanced visualisation capability including augmented and virtual reality. This in turn will give easy controllable access to standardised and reusable data across the operational asset base, combining standard asset configuration data, real-time situational data, historic performance data, and environmental data. The visualisation of this data in real-time using the capabilities described above will enable a better understanding of operations and asset performance.
How to approach the digital plant
Go for quick wins by selecting low-investment and high-value technologies. The use of drones in critical asset inspection operations across a network, for example, results in immediate gains at limited cost, and avoids the cost and effort of interruptions to water supply. Investing in running proof of values such as leakage management, and energy management significantly reduces Totex, improves customer service and safe guards the environment.
Launch projects with high-value applications such as predictive maintenance, intervention management, or Digital Asset Lifecycle Management to ensure recurring gains. Analytics, Big Data, and advanced modelling are used to detect leaks or losses as well as for predictive maintenance.
For faster gains, invest in applications that allow for more targeted operational efficiencies, such as smart autonomous site operations, investment planning, asset monitoring and sludge/waste monitoring.
Finally, rely on emerging applications and technologies, like additive manufacturing. The increased use of 3D printing in engineering or construction lifecycle models in capital delivery, for example, are being used to drive standardisation of assets and asset data throughout the design-build-commission-operate lifecycle of water and wastewater plants.
The industry is changing at an alarming rate and yet there is still a distance to go. Our report showed that UK utilities have only invested approximately 35 per cent of 2015’s revenue in digital over the last five years versus approximately 80 per cent in France.
With the former head of Ofwat Cathryn Ross heavily criticising the industry as delivering “an analogue service in a digital age” it’s clear from a regulatory perspective alone this will not be enough.