Ofwat kicks off third innovation challenge

The third round of water innovation funding has been launched by water regulator Ofwat with £38 million made available from Monday.

Innovative schemes can apply for funding of up to £10 million as part of the Transform stream from a total pot of £30 million, or for up to £2 million as part of the Catalyst stream.

Winners will be announced in April and May 2023 ahead of more rounds of the contest beginning.

Funding of £200 million was ringfenced at PR19 to incentivise water companies to develop innovative solutions to sector-wide challenges such as leakage, achieving net zero, enhancing the natural environment and using open data to deliver value for customers.

The challenge, which is run with Isle Utilities and Arup and delivered by Challenge Works, has already allocated funding to Anglian’s triple carbon reduction solution; Northumbrian’s National Leakage Research and Test Centre; and Affinity’s seagrass restoration scheme in previous rounds.

Projects are funded to develop ideas in real-life conditions at scale that have the potential to deliver wide-scale transformational change to the sector.

From next year a third element of the competition will offer organisations the opportunity to enter independently from a water company for the first time. Ofwat said it hoped to attract innovators from energy to agriculture.

John Russell, senior director at Ofwat said: “This summer has shown the huge importance of water, and this competition will provide transformative changes that can help to better preserve and manage this vital resource. Two years’ worth of revolutionary ideas from Water Breakthrough Challenge winners show there are ways to tackle these growing challenges. These ground-breaking solutions now make it possible for the water industry to better anticipate weather and temperature changes, detect and prevent infrastructure problems, and – importantly – help customers reduce bills.”

Market Improvement Fund winners

Innovation geared to the non-household market has also been funded through the second batch of Market Improvement Fund, facilitated by MOSL on behalf of the Strategic Panel, that awarded more than £890,000 between nine projects.

These included a project between Wave and Occutrace to investigate broken meters across all wholesalers; an Anglian scheme to segment and benchmark business customers’ water consumption; a collaboration between Portsmouth, Yorkshire and a software company that offers a way for companies to fulfil service requests from developers.

Yorkshire was also involved with a research scheme into business voids to improve data sets with Business Stream and Economic Insight.

Elsewhere, a water efficiency project by Wave and Isle Utilities called REDUCED gives retailers access to technologies that will help consumers drive consumption down. Wave will also run a project using Internet of Things technology across 250 pilot small commercial customers to drive usage down. Meanwhile, another efficiency scheme sees Yorkshire together with MOSL utilise granular consumption data to understand usage to help customers find leaks and lower usage.

The competition is funded through charges to wholesalers and retailers to develop ideas that will benefit the whole market by easing known problems for all participants.