The post Thames Water to invest £12 billion in new infrastructure appeared first on The Source.
]]>The investments planned already include £2.1 billion to strengthen the resilience of its network and reduce leakage.
In a statement online, Steve Robertson, CEO of Thames Water, said: “Our proposals are a true reflection of what our customers have told us they want to see and we appreciate all the time they’ve taken to give us their opinions and advice.”
The firm was fined £120 million earlier this year after the UK’s national water regulator, Ofwat, found the firm lacked sufficient oversight and control of its leakage performance.
Around a quarter of the water treated by the company is currently lost, although the firm has said its new investment will reduce leakages by 15 percent and cut the proportion of incidents related to pollution by 18 percent.
Thames Water is one of several large firms across England and Wales expected to hand over its plans for this period to the regulator. Other companies include Severn Trent and United Utilities, which plan to reduce the average water bill by 5 percent (Severn Trent) and 10.5 percent (United Utilities).
Robertson said customers of Thames Water can expect bills to flat in real terms over the planned five-year period. Shareholders meanwhile will receive annual distributions of around £20 million, which he said would reflect the company’s priority of improving services.
Ofwat’s 2019 price review requires that businesses detail exactly how they intend to meet the needs of their customers. This includes outlining their investment strategy, charges to customers and resilience measures.
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]]>The post UK water watchdog criticises customer neglect during thaw appeared first on The Source.
]]>The nicknamed ‘Beast from the East’ caused by a blizzards blown west from Siberia produced sub-freezing temperatures before the thaw which burst water pipes and left 200,000 customers without supply for more than four hours.
Individual water companies faced several common difficulties under the conditions, such as the rural-urban divide of customers as well as topography. The regulator however said that, of an analysis of 17 companies, there showed “considerable variation in the quality of response from companies and this contributed significantly to the differences between these figures”.
The review, published on the events after the cold weather, attempts to “get to the bottom of what happened, to understand how water companies across the industry performed and, most importantly, to make sure lessons are learned and changes take place so that things are better for the future,” Ofwat said.
Companies such as Severn Trent Water and Thames Water were shown to have lacked appropriate planning for the events. A large number of minor pipe bursts – in some extreme cases as much as 85 percent of the total network – were not fully prepped, revealing the limits of firms’ safety mechanisms.
Thames Water has since repaid its users £120 million for its failure to control leaks.
The problems picked up placed a constraint on supply and indicated a further lack of real-time data on issues affecting the companies’ networks. This made it hard for the companies to identify problems in the first instance.
“As these companies had to design and deliver a response as it happened, they were slower and less effective than companies that already had robust plans in place and had better network data,” the report explained.
Better performing companies included Northumbrian Water, United Utilities, Wessex Water and Yorkshire Water, which employed real time information and monitoring systems to identify and manage the issues better.
According to the regulator, these firms “demonstrated resilience” in their systems, allowing them to move water supplies to areas of most need. They had effective governance processes with clear escalation routes through the company and key external stakeholders.
While the thaw affected fewer than 3 percent of all customers across the country, Ofwat said that, in absolute terms, a significant number of people were impacted for a long period of time. Interruptions went on for several days in some cases, and many customers who managed to keep their water supply experienced low water pressure.
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]]>The post Thames Water hit with £120 million penalty over leakages appeared first on The Source.
]]>This follows an investigation by the UK’s water watchdog, Ofwat, which found that the utility’s board did not have sufficient oversight and control of the company’s leakage performance.
“High leakage creates unnecessary strain on the environment, excess costs for customers and increased risk of water shortages,” said Rachel Fletcher, Chief Executive, Ofwat. “A well-run water company will have a good understanding of the condition of its pipes and will be able to reduce leakage over time.”
The £65 million payment to customers is on top of £55 million in automatic penalties incurred by the company for missing the commitment it made to customers to cut leaks. Each customer will get a total rebate of approximately £15 over the next two years.
Ofwat has set all water companies a target of bringing down leakage by at least another 15 percent up to 2025 and expects further reductions beyond this date.
“We met our leakage targets for a decade but our recent performance has not been good enough,” explained Steve Robertson, CEO, Thames Water. “We let our customers down and for that we’re sorry. We have taken more control of how we manage the network and are investing significantly more in people and resources to tackle leakage, get back on track and then go beyond.”
As part of the proposed settlement, the company has committed to getting its leakage performance back in line with what it has promised it will deliver for its customers in 2019-20. It will also publish its performance each month in tackling leaks, appoint an independent monitor to certify the information in its monthly leakage reports, and do more to engage with customers on leakage issues–including at its board.
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]]>The post Water efficiency experts meet in Bath to debate solutions appeared first on The Source.
]]>Waterwise hosted the IWA ‘Efficient 2017’ conference, leveraging new standards, labels, incentives, data, markets and policies
Demand management through conservation and leak reduction is arguably the cleanest, cheapest, fairest and fastest way for any city to achieve water security. It can help the world meet the Sustainable Development Goals. It’s also at the heart of resilience, added Trevor Bishop, Strategy and Policy Director of the UK’s regulatory agency, Ofwat.
“But if water efficiency is so great,” asked Stuart White, Director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) at the University of Technology Sydney, “Why isn’t it happening everywhere?”
On 18 July, hundreds of water professionals arrived in the ancient Roman spa town of Bath, England, to answer that rhetorical question. Some said it is happening, and shared experiences about how cities are doing more with less.
Change comes quietly through market pressure. Chris Philpot of Smart Approved WaterMark shared how his expert panel advises and certifies a broad array of goods and services in Europe and Australia, from pool and garden care to car washing and rainwater harvesting. The companies seek exposure and measure up.
Meanwhile Jonah Schein described how 25,000 parts and products–from urinals to dishwashers to irrigation controllers–have since 2006 earned the US federal government’s WaterSense label. These in aggregate have reduced demand by more than 2.1 trillion gallons over the last decade, saving consumers US$43 billion off their water and energy bills.
Yet a lingering problem is that the playing field is not level, limiting real change. Various sessions pointed out that efficiency eats into the bottom line, and cities that pay for new supply infrastructure add assets that count while invisible demand management does not. “We’re doing the economics wrong,” Stuart White suggested in a case study in how to break the Kuznets curve, “unless we can cancel lost revenue as a net benefit. Otherwise there’s no incentive for the utility to invest in savings.”
Others harnessed Big Data in new ways. Andrew Tucker of Thames Water leveraged smart meters to reduce usage through behavioural change, leak detection, home visits, and ‘GreenRedeem’ incentives through a long-term online portal.
Christine Boyle, founder and CEO of Valor Water Analytics, showed how through automation and machine learning, her technology could locate hidden revenue within utility systems through an “apparent loss detection tool.”
“Cluster analysis” tools, combined with real-time metering allowed Rob Lawson of Artesia to explode the very concept of ‘the water customer’ into several behavioural types, each of whom had different levels of engagement and demand at disparate times of day.
Some efficiency veterans have turned inward. Paul Lander of the University of Colorado and Michelle Maddaus revealed “the campus as a living laboratory.” Why? Colleges are needy. The University of California alone uses nearly 20 billion litres per year. They’re also big. Cloistered mini-cities of students, faculty and staff in arid California add up to one-tenth of the population. But despite technical expertise and open minds, colleges had not connected the dots, and were thus ripe for interventions, which revealed dramatic savings.
Wrapping up the conference, host Mary Ann Dickinson, Chair of IWA’s Efficient Urban Water Management Specialist Group described how cities worldwide face the same pressures: reduced water availability, rising energy costs, changing weather patterns, and new supplies becoming more expensive than ever. As head of the Alliance for Water Efficiency, she advocated for “Net Blue” a national ordinance that allows growth but drives water neutrality though “water offsets.”
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