Improving visibility on energy consumption at a prominent water services company

Obtaining visibility into performance with asset-level data

Responsible for water and wastewater services in the North West of England, a prominent water services company delivers 200 million litres of water every day to more than three million homes and businesses, alongside treating all wastewater in the region.

To better understand the cost and environmental efficiency of their operations, the water services company wanted to get better visibility of energy consumption at an asset-level within their water processing plants.

They were looking for a cost effective solution that would provide them with granular insight into how energy was being used across their sites, so they could optimise their operations, reduce costs and deliver against their environmental sustainability targets.

To deliver the best results, they wanted a tool to visualise the data in real-time, to enable their field engineers to take immediate action upon observation of anomalies in their operations.

Optimising their energy strategy

To gain the visibility that they needed over their energy estate, the water services company decided to partner with Centrica Business Solutions and deploy their energy insights technology. Energy insights from Centrica Business Solutions consist of self-powered and nonintrusive wireless sensors that collect real-time energy data and analytics from their all their energy consuming assets. These sensors continuously collect data in real-time, enabling the water services company to comprehensively understand their energy consumption and optimise their energy strategy.

The sensors are wireless so they can be rapidly installed by their own Field Service Engineers with little or no downtime to operations.

Each of their circa 3,000 sensors sends a reading to the Panoramic Power bridge every 10 seconds, collecting a total of 9.46 billion data monitoring points every year. This data is delivered to our energy management platform, PowerRadar™, for analysis, where it is collected into 30-minute datasets for analysis by the water services company. PowerRadar provides the water services company with daily and weekly reports on their energy usage, which they use to develop an informed, datadriven energy strategy.

With real-time visibility of clean water and waste water processing, they are able to make immediate interventions that improve network resilience, maximise capital plant investment, optimise maintenance regimes, and minimise equipment failures.

Reducing their energy waste

By utilising the data gathered by the Panoramic Power sensors, the water services company has been able to identify opportunities to optimise how energy is used across their operations and develop a more informed, energy strategy. By reducing energy waste, they have been able to realise cost savings and deliver on their sustainability targets.

For instance, by harnessing the data that has been gathered, they were able to identify an issue with their large air distributers and mixing operations, which was rectified through process modifications. By having visibility of their energy consumption and being able to visualise the data more easily, they can conduct better root cause analysis of issues, which enables them to make cost and carbon savings and enhance operational performance.

What’s more, new regulations require all UK water utilities that have colocated clean and waste water processing to report to Ofwat on their energy consumption separately. Energy insights from Centrica Business Solutions enable the water services company to easily monitor energy consumption on both sides of their water processing operations, so they can meet their regulatory obligations.

Centrica Business Solutions has also supported them by helping to automate the process of exporting the data into their own IT infrastructure, so they can more easily measure their energy estate against other datasets and develop even more informed insights.