The life geospatial - starting your day
The miracle of potable water ‘on tap’ – hydration as a service, cleanliness as a service. Most readers will be accustomed to this but that it is the UN’s 6th Sustainable Development Goal tells you that it is not a universal birthright. Trans-boundary water disputes are nothing new and will continue to be sources of tension or worse whether along the Amu Darya, Nile, Euphrates, Mekong or Yangtse.
Photo by Samad Deldar from Pexels
And it’s been this way for so long that the closest many of us come to think about it is when we look at our bills or the seeming number of leaks in the underground networks. Geography (and geology) are intrinsic to that water supply, location critical to building out networks and geospatial data and insight to the effective construction, operation, maintenance and customer support. This stuff does not build and run itself!
Setting aside bedrock, permeability, catchment management and groundwater on the one hand and housing and commercial stock on the other how is it that the water utilities use and depend on geospatial data and insight to keep the taps running?
Sensors. Sensing technologies are become integral to the digitisation of the UK water industry and the current regulatory asset management period (AMP7, 2020-25) for England and Wales. With the cost of sensors tumbling they are proliferating across all parts of the water network, from domestic smart meters up system to catchment flow and along all parts of the supply chain in between and across all control systems. As the cost comes down so the opportunity to realise the value of real time data expands. The water industry can begin to assemble large volumes of data from points across the system where visibility as previously been absent or very limited.
That value can be achieved in different ways, for example:
- Helping companies identify water efficiency savings to meet OFWAT targets in business plans including upto 15% OpEx savings (while controlling customer pricing and improving customer experience!)
- Communicate accurately with customers
- Respond to leaks more quickly
- More efficiently coordinate field teams
- Develop predictive maintenance scheduling
- Investigate changing demand response
- Support shielding and vulnerable customers
As Associate OFWAT Director Alison Fergusson “I can’t think of a place where water companies wouldn’t want to have a bit more information”.
Every bit of data from every sensor comes with location embedded. The sensor may be on a meter, a valve, a pump, a hopper, an inlet, an outlet, at an address, along a road, under an access panel, in a works, wherever it is it can be placed on a map. Not that it always will be. The value comes from the better decisions that are made by call handlers, executives and boards, despatchers, procurement and researchers amongst others. Those decisions are informed by insights gleaned from bringing together myriad data sets about the network and its customers and looking at them through a geospatial lens.
So, pop across to that miracle that is your tap, run enough data-enabled deliverable, sorry, water, into your kettle and have another cuppa!