Can water innovation truly change the game?

Game-changer is a term frivolously bandied about to describe innovations the world over. The water sector is no less inclined to push novel technologies and systems labelled as game-changing.

But with performance improvements needed quickly, the game is indeed in need of changing.

For areas that haven’t traditionally embraced technology – such as thousands of kilometres of supply pipes and wastewater networks – there is space for radical thought.

At this week’s Water Industry Innovation Conference, John Russell, architect of Ofwat’s innovation fund, told water companies that innovation is no longer a nice to have, it must be business as usual.

Truly impressive work to add digital monitors and sensors to sewer systems, thus creating smart networks, was unveiled by Southern Water; while Yorkshire Water also moved towards maximising capacity, pre-empting and preventing blockages to achieve better environmental performance with monitoring at two catchments.

Accelerations for sewer systems have been driven by customer, regulator and political expectations for water quality in rivers and is undoubtedly going to keep developing into the coming AMP cycles.

At PR19, driving leakage rates down had political impetus, which has brought spectacular advances in metering and monitoring that give companies better oversight of their networks than ever before. For PR24, the strategic policy statement made it clear that investment should be tailored to reduce the amount of spills from combined sewer overflows.

Although no silver bullet solution has emerged, there is no shortage of ideas to control sewer flows, maximise network capacity ahead of storms or include a treatment stage at CSO points to filter combined waste and stormwater.

Prohibitive costs – not to mention disruption – of separating combined sewer networks mean we are likely to see no shortage of smaller interventions and ideas to reach targets without eye-watering investment.

The Ofwat innovation fund of £200 million at PR19 has so far sparked more than 40 collaborative schemes by shouldering some of the risk to let ideas incubate. The fund will be renewed at PR24, with a total of £300 million available to scale up novel designs that address challenges shared by the industry.

Looking ahead, it will be exciting watching the impact of innovations coming from the fund on how networks are managed and the knock-on-effect for performance.

Water efficiency has always been the Cinderella of the sector. A drier than average winter is leaving the UK facing another summer of restrictions and droughts, but the game is yet to be changed for demand management.

Ofwat is throwing some weight behind efficiency, with a £100 million fund at the next price review to develop strategies to start bringing household consumption down.

This emphasis could be just what demand management needs to move Cinderella into the spotlight as the clock ticks towards a drier future.