Embracing change: will energy dilemma drive change in the water industry?

The world is facing an energy dilemma. By 2050, our energy demand will have doubled. But by 2050, we will need to halve our carbon emissions in order to avert dramatic climate change.

This was the uncomfortable fact with which Dominique Gayraud, Solutions Vice President Water and Wastewater with Schneider Electric, opened his presentation at Schneider’s PlantStruxure NOW! 2012 User Conference.

By 2050, Gayraud continued, 70% of the population will live in cities, adding further pressure to already ageing and overloaded infrastructure - particularly water and wastewater systems. The supply of potable water and treatment of wastewater and stormwater will be vital.

As energy represents approximately a third of the operating costs for water plants, this situation presents the water industry with quite a dilemma. Add rising energy costs and stable water prices to the mix, Gayraud said, and “energy savings become a must”.

Remote possibilities

According to Simon Zander, General Manager Water and Wastewater Industry Business with Schneider Electric, Australia faces yet another challenge: that of drought-proofing one of the driest countries in the world. Zander co-presented with Gayraud at the conference, outlining how global water and wastewater trends affect the Australian industry.

A current trend in the Australian mining industry, Zander said, is for large mining companies to establish their own water plants in remote areas rather than relying on the municipal water supply. Remote-area water treatment is also increasingly being automated and monitored from a central location, Zander said.

Speaking with Sustainability Matters after his presentation, Zander gave the example of Rio Tinto’s remote operations centre in Perth that controls a number of plants in the Pilbara region. “There are other water companies in Australia that Schneider Electric works with that have similar types of philosophies - a single control room monitoring assets over a very large scale,” Zander said. “So it’s about utilising your human resources the best way you can to get the best outcome for each of those plants.”

“And it’s also their expertise,” added Roger Brown, SCADA and Control System manager for Yarra Valley Water, who also spoke with Sustainability Matters. “You’ve got that one guy who can bring more expertise and then apply that across a number of plants all at once, rather than having a good operator in just one plant.”

With many industries facing a dwindling talent pool as they lose the expertise of older employees to retirement, efficient use of existing expertise will become a necessity. Automation and remote monitoring could be key to helping companies get the most out of their resources.

Sustainable building blocks

Yarra Valley Water recently upgraded its system with ClearSCADA from Schneider Electric. While the system itself doesn’t yet give direct sustainability benefits, Zander and Brown say it’s a building block that will facilitate energy savings and other benefits into the future.

“I don’t think we’ve really extended what we’re doing to do better energy management as yet,” Brown said. “But we definitely could. The tool’s there.”

While the new system hasn’t yet led to energy savings, it does allow Yarra Valley Water to more closely monitor its processes and avert potential environmental disasters. Brown described a trial Yarra Valley Water is conducting involving siphons.

“Siphons are where the sewer goes under an obstruction - usually a creek,” Brown explained. “So it’ll go under the creek and back up again and it’s a prime opportunity for silting up, and if it does that then the sewage can spill into the creek.”

These siphons are managed by way of having two pipes running under an obstruction; if one pipe blocks up, the sewage can flow through the other. Problems occur when both pipes block up. The pipes are checked periodically, Brown said, a process which theoretically happens before both pipes become blocked. Without monitoring, however, there are no guarantees.

Yarra Valley Water is now using battery-powered monitors to keep an eye on levels upstream. “If the level starts getting higher and there’s a second pipe, then we can alarm that and get someone to go out and proactively clear that first pipe well before the second blocks up,” Brown said. “So it becomes condition-based maintenance, and averts the chance of a spill into the creek.”

Currently, Yarra Valley Water monitors just one siphon in this way, but Brown said a proposal is in place for capital expenditure to monitor the remaining 35 siphons in the area.

Take the pressure down

New automation and monitoring systems gather vast swathes of data daily. “The amount of data being collected is doubling every six months,” Zander said. “You just don’t have time to look at it all, so you need other systems looking at that - systems looking at systems to tell you what’s going on.”

Optimisation software can analyse all this data, Brown added, and can highlight things that aren’t right in a plant or system. Yarra Valley Water uses an intelligent system to analyse data exported from its system to find leaks. Brown said this is delivering significant water savings.

“Putting water - treated water - into a system and then letting it leak is a waste of resources, a waste of energy, a waste of chemicals and a waste of asset capability,” Zander said. “So leak reduction is a big focus for water utilities.”

Jens Løppenthien of Danish company 7T, also presenting at the conference, outlined how adjusting water pressure to meet demand - rather than setting a standard pressure for all situations - creates significant savings. Løppenthien explained that a 10 or 20% pressure reduction would have little impact on the consumer, but could reduce new and existing leaks, reduce pumping costs and reduce energy use. Maintaining higher pressure than required, he argued, wastes water and increases maintenance, leaks and energy use.

“There’s quite a bit of evidence around in Australia that reducing the pressure reduces the leaks,” Zander said. “There’s a correlation between the amount of pressure and the amount of leakage.”

And also bursts, adds Brown. Reducing the pressure reduces bursts - but once the pressure is reduced it needs to stay at that lower level. Suddenly increasing the pressure can lead to an increased number of bursts.

“Water is conservative”

While evidence such as that presented by Løppenthien makes pressure reduction seem like a good choice on a number of levels, Brown said the water industry may be slow to take this idea up. Any change in a water plant changes the risk profile, Brown said.

“The water business is very conservative,” Brown said. “We’re really talking about moving people’s perceptions of risk, and that happens slowly. So we have to prove a few and get their confidence and then we can do more.”

This was a sentiment echoed by Simon Mazier of Perceptive Engineering, a Schneider collaborative partner. “The water industry is by nature very cautious,” Mazier said in his presentation at the conference. “There’s always a headlong rush to be second.” Mazier predicts that optimisation will become the way of the future for water and wastewater - just as soon as the industry dares to take the first step.

The new generation of data gathering and analysis software may, however, give the water industry the evidence it needs to make changes. In addition, increasing energy costs and sustainability policies may prove to be the impetus the water industry needs to embrace change.