Leakage and wastewater emissions focus for innovation winners

Schemes to drive down leakage, reduce emissions from wastewater processing and support financially vulnerable billpayers have been selected as winners of the Ofwat Water Breakthrough Challenge.

Now in its second year, the challenge grants each innovation between £1 million and £10 million to develop ideas that benefit the wider sector.

John Russell, senior director at Ofwat, said: “It’s crucial for the water sector to come up with new, innovative ideas to fix the challenges that the sector – and society – faces. The winners revealed today will help develop ideas to save more water, turn captured carbon into useful products, and – ultimately – make the sector more sustainable.”

The fund was created to help stimulate new, bold initiatives through collaboration with universities, charities, engineering practices and technology firms.

Sharon Darcy, director of Sustainability First and chair of the judging panel added: “Though many will think of net zero as an issue for power companies, the water sector consumes 2-3% of electricity generated in the UK. Novel solutions that bear down on greenhouse gas emissions like CECCU and mainstreaming approaches like Enabling Smart Water Communities that help to manage and reduce demand for water can go a long way to helping the sector reach its net zero targets for the good of everyone.”

The seven projects to receive funding are:

• CECCU – led by Severn Trent this aims to reduce and reuse C02 emissions from combined heat and power engines (CHP) by extracting renewable energy and biogas from the CHP combustion process. Severn Trent will work with Clarke Energy and Carbon Capture Machine to develop and demonstrate the technology at an industrial scale at SVT’s Derby plant. Removed carbon will be converted into by-products such as paint and fertiliser, which the team said is a “pioneering example of the circular economy in action”.
• Enabling Water Smart Communities – led by Anglian, this is a water management project combining infrastructure, technologies, policies, and behaviour change initiatives to improve lives through co-ordinated water management. It will address regulation and policy, asset stewardship and affordability concerns by rethinking asset management models; challenge regulatory and policy standards to support stakeholders; and understand stakeholder motivations to develop financial models to unlock new investment sources, and realign existing sources.
• Managing Background Leakage – led by Welsh Water, this scheme aims to redefine the detectable limit of leakage to help pinpoint and repair hidden leaks and other factors contributing to background leakage. It will create more sustainable ways of reducing leakage to avoid increasing abstractions.
•  National Leakage Research Test Centre – led by Northumbrian Water, this aims to accelerate work on reducing leakage with the creation of a buried test network to trial techniques without compromising supply or quality. It will see repair robots and sealants inserted into the 5km water supply to see how they perform. The network will include new and old pipes in various materials and diameters just like a live network. It will collect and recycle leaked water and simulate customers drawing water during tests.
•  Hyvalue – Hydrogen from Biogas  – led by Welsh Water, this project aims to convert biogas from sewage into hydrogen, which could increase the decarbonisation potential of biogas up to 10 times as well as maximising the carbon capture and minimise emissions of methane, nitrous oxide and particulates. Together with Costain, the first step will be a hydrogen study with the University of South Wales to assess cost effectiveness of the scheme before designing a plant at one of Welsh Water’s anaerobic digestion facilities to assess the technical feasibility of building a plant in AMP8.
• Stream – led by Northumbrian, this is an open data project that will design and deliver the data network required to share useful industry datasets in a secure, standardised and accessible way. It will allow dataflow into larger datasets and enable intersector collaboration on problem solving.
•  Water4All – led by Southern Water, this scheme will identify and engage with financially vulnerable customers to offer them support by increasing access to social tariffs and the assistance available from water companies. A consortium of experts from multiple sectors will combine knowledge and data to find consumers who most need help to maximise their income, reduce their bills and lower their carbon footprint.