In his regular column, Oliver Grievson, Associate Director AtkinsRéalis and Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor at the University of Exeter, asks if we have what we can call a “smart” wastewater network, or if there’s a bit more travelling to be done before we arrive.
A number of years ago I was chairing the WWT Smart Water Conference and started to talk about the need to adopt Digital Water and in particular smart wastewater networks. At the time I was challenged by a member of the audience who stated, “we’ve been waiting for smart wastewater networks for over ten years, and it will probably be another ten or twenty before we get them”.
At the time I had the vision of a smart wastewater network where all the information was available in a “Minority Report” style. I imagined people in the control room with a full situational awareness of issues that were about to happen in the wastewater network, directing resources to prevent the backing up of the sewers and fully aware of where the sewers were blocked and what areas might have issues.
Approximately ten years after that comment, where is the water industry? Do we have what we can call a “smart” wastewater network?
As an industry we have:
- A wastewater network with a vast increase in the amount of monitoring in it so that we can understand what is going on. There are approximately 14,500 Event Duration Monitors on storm overflows and over 100,000 sewer level monitors monitoring the wastewater network. This is set to be joined by 6,000 emergency overflow event duration monitors and over 20,000 quality monitors over the next ten years.
- Service models that will use artificial intelligence to predict where sewer blockages are occurring as well as providing an inference on where inflow and infiltration are happening within the network.
- Services that will grade the intelligence of the wastewater network to help understand its capabilities, and to act as a smart wastewater network with the potential to use the same solutions to model where we can design capacity into the network to create a more intelligent and controlled system. This is going to be vital to address the storm overflows reduction plan.
- Technology solutions that can be used to control the wastewater network and create temporary storage within the network which can use hyper-local forecasting to enable dynamic operation of the system.
Underpinning all the technological solutions that the industry has been putting in place over the last five to ten years the industry also now has the mandate and the approved investment to improve things in a way that the industry has never had before.
So, how do we deliver the mandate that we have? It is, as with all these things, a collaborative effort between water companies, technology providers and the consultancies within the industry to get the best sustainable solution to reduce the environmental impact that we have on the environment. It is looking at the issues that water companies face using the drainage and wastewater management plans and coming up with the scenarios using all the grey, green and digital tools that the industry has at its disposal. We may be able to do this with the tools that we currently have or we may need to drive innovation to develop new tools, to give the water industry and its customers the best value solution, whether that is building more concrete, or creating digital and control-based solutions, or running modelling scenarios to allow green solutions such as sustainable urban drainage systems to slow the flow.
