December 14, 2022
breakthrough-2 collaboration customers innovation leakage open-data vulnerable-consumers wastewater water-breakthrough-challenge water-innovation winnersThe benefits of cross-industry collaboration
One of the key goals of Ofwat’s £200 million Innovation Fund is to promote collaboration both inside and outside the water sector and make it easier to apply learning and innovation across the whole sector, rather than just within individual companies.
For water companies, creating ways of working together is often complex. But if innovation can be shared and scaled across the industry, the potential is huge – whether that’s to reduce carbon emissions, avoid disruption to society or save costs for customers.
At the same time, by partnering with people and organisations in other sectors, water companies may find innovations and fresh ideas to address some of the problems facing water and wastewater services. The water sector may also find that other industries face similar challenges. Collaboration may unlock solutions that not only deliver benefits in water but across our economy, society and environment. Our most recently announced competition, the Water Discovery Challenge, has been introduced to tap into innovators from other sectors.
The Ofwat Innovation Fund is already having an impact.
Below are some of the winning projects that have been awarded funding as part of the Innovation Fund. They showcase how much can be achieved through close collaboration and how cross-industry efforts can result in ideas that catalyse progress in the sector, and affect the environment and society too.
Stream, led by Northumbrian Water, is an ambitious initiative that brings together 15 companies to deliver data-sharing infrastructure that will catalyse data innovation as well as improving transparency and accountability.
There is an increasing appetite from water companies to explore the potential benefits of using open data as a tool to enable innovation. Until now, each water company has been presenting information differently with a lot of duplicated effort, little consistency, and fewer opportunities to interrogate and compare data sets, making it difficult to solve complex industry challenges. Stream will develop a blueprint that identifies a way of sharing all kinds of data (from environmental to leakage and consumption) consistent across the industry.
By looking at data that is made ‘publicly’ available between companies, the sector can gain a detailed and accurate understanding of common problems and begin to pinpoint solutions. Better data sharing can enable innovators to tackle key problems experienced sector-wide – preventing environmental incidents, reducing water-associated carbon emissions and reducing costs for customers.
The ultimate aim is to create an Open Data platform that is a single point of entry for sharing data in a way that facilitates easy discovery, understanding and access. What innovators, journalists or interested members of the public might do with that publicly available data is yet unknown. However, presenting it in a uniform and digestible format along with relevant business context opens up possibilities – for example, a data scientist could download a data set and create a new tool that alerts customers if there is a pollution event near them. The project is set to increase transparency and trust in the water sector as well as stimulate greater innovation in solving some of the biggest challenges the sector faces.
Similarly, Thames Water’s Unlocking Digital Twins project is attempting to create data standards across the industry so that water companies can use the same algorithms for data-driven innovation.
A digital twin is a virtual copy of a physical asset, process, or system that looks like and behaves identically to its real-world counterpart. A digital twin replicates processes and can predict possible performance outcomes and issues that the real-world product might undergo. Using a digital twin, water companies can create models that improve prognostics, helping them to better maintain the physical assets in the water network. There is currently a risk that each company creates an isolated system that only works within itself and cannot interact with other twins that might be developed elsewhere. But with an agreed set of standards, the industry could go further, faster, when it comes to problem-solving.
Thames Water has been using digital twins to address leakage and asset management. Establishing shared standards for digital twins means that when one company comes up with a solution that helps reduce leakage, a developer can write a new application once and make it openly available, rather than having to go through the long process of trying to integrate it into various different company systems. It’ll be quick to integrate and apply for other companies that have adopted the same standards. Another example might be using digital twins to model a customer’s route in a call centre, so that the caller can be connected to the right person as quickly as possible.
This project is currently identifying the minutiae of how to work together most effectively. The team works with agile principles; if the project fails, it will fail fast, but it will have created a better understanding of what is required to create sector-wide standards. If standards are adopted and improved over time, it should be possible to greatly reduce time to deliver value to more customers.
Traditionally, water companies have been responsible for treating their own wastewater in their own treatment plants. For some time, the industry has been exploring whether there might be a better solution for the treatment of the residual sludge produced as a by-product of the water treatment process, or ‘bioresources’.
Anglian Water has more than 1,000 water recycling sites. From these, sludge is collected and then moved by pipeline or road transport to ten different centres that treat it before recycling it for agriculture (as a soil conditioner) and using the biogas – another by-product of sludge – to generate renewable power.
Currently, water companies each look after the treatment of their own wastewater within their geographical boundaries. This new project will explore whether it might be possible for companies to work together and send or receive waste to or from a different company. This means that sludge could be taken to the nearest available plant for processing, even if it is located over the borders into another water company’s plant.
If this kind of system were in place, it would save the resource and energy involved in transporting sludge over long distances. Ultimately, there might be an outside third party that could take on responsibility for treating bioresources – this would also promote competition which could lead to increased efficiency. In theory, bioresources from wastewater could be treated at the same plants as recycled food waste – although, whilst this is technically possible, it’s currently very complicated due to the high burden of regulation.
The Unlocking Bioresources Market Growth project will explore the risks and rewards of collaboration. Over the next year, specialists will research and model the possible ways the sector might work together and understand more about the benefits. It would result not only in cost-savings, which could be passed on to customers, but reduce carbon emissions by minimising the transportation of sludge. This project will identify the opportunities for possible collaboration so that water companies can consider them as part of their long-term strategies to build a resilient sector for the future.
Utility companies hold priority services registers (PSRs), which are details of customers in vulnerable circumstances or with additional needs, so that they can be better supported. These might be a visual impairment, meaning someone needs large-print communications or an interpreter service if English isn’t their first language. There are others who, because of medical needs or mobility issues, would require additional support in case of a water or energy outage – such as bottled water delivered to their door or an alternative power source.
Currently, each provider keeps their own distinct register, but Support for All is seeking to amalgamate these in order to better reach and support those who may need a more tailored service. The idea is to develop and build a technology platform that allows water and utility companies to share and store sensitive priority services data securely. The project will start by developing a regional pilot with a small number of energy and water operators, with ambitions to test and expand nationally if successful.
The idea, led by Northumbrian Water, was started during the company’s annual innovation festival in 2021, bringing together the water sector, NHS, charities, third-sector support, data and other utility companies. It was clear that some customers were sharing their needs to some company’s registers but not others. The team’s starting point was to look at how to make it easier for customers to share their needs with all relevant organisations by providing one touchpoint – thereby removing the stress and hassle of updating all utility providers individually.
In early trials between just two companies sharing data, it was estimated that up to 36% of names on a water company’s list were unknown to an energy company, and up to 63% of names on the energy company’s list were unknown to a water company. Each company’s register contains tens of thousands of names, so by sharing data even just between two companies, thousands of vulnerable customers are set to benefit.
The project has brought together over 30 organisations. In further innovation sprints since the festival, the teams have looked to address the multiple complexities of collaboration, such as building software to support matching datasets and addressing the legal requirements of data-sharing. Data protection officers and legal teams from each organisation have all collaborated to ensure the platform can be built in a way that complies with them.
In the long term, the possibilities of the project go beyond just utilities. It could bring together third sector, support agencies, charities and local authorities to ensure that customers are adequately supported; or even expand to provide financial support or collaborate with the NHS, with the hope of providing a one-stop-shop of support outside utilities.
As the water industry looks ahead to the likely effects of climate change, with unpredictable weather and the cost of living crisis impacting people across the UK, it’s clear that by sharing information accurately and working together, the sector can explore and exploit impactful ideas. Collaborating to improve water management and reduce the environmental toll of the sector, as well as supporting vulnerable customers in emergencies, will be vital in the years to come.
Around three million households in the UK already need support with essential utility bills and that’s before energy costs are predicted to rise dramatically. Currently, suppliers have no coordinated database identifying these customers, meaning that people experiencing financial vulnerability are forced to explain their position multiple times to different utility companies to seek the support they need. This is not only time consuming, but for many people an embarrassing process at a moment of great stress.
Water4All, a new initiative led by Southern Water, hopes to overcome this by collaborating with other major utility companies and data specialists to create and introduce a central database for customers experiencing financial vulnerability. This would enable multiple suppliers to know who needs their help and proactively approach them to provide support – saving the customer embarrassment, significant expense across their bills and reducing their carbon footprint through smarter water use.
Furthermore, the Water4All programme identifies where these customers are missing out on additional income. Help provided through an income maximisation service will provide an average of £2,500 per year of additional tax-free income. This should be sufficient to cover the cost of the current cost of living crises. In addition, eligible households will gain free eco measures to reduce their bills further. Water4All is accessing some of the estimated £15 billion unclaimed benefits sitting in HM Treasury to put directly into customers’ pockets.
Recent research suggests that only 6% of people who need financial help reach out, partly due to embarrassment and partly because many aren’t aware that help is available. If customers can be helped sooner, they could avoid even deeper debt by accessing support across their utility providers, altering their water habits and becoming more environmentally friendly in the process.
Much of the data needed for the project is available – Water4All will put the pieces together and make them available in a usable format to the industry. As part of this, data solutions company Sagacity will work with multi-sector experts to combine industry knowledge and deep domain expertise with data, for instance, from credit bureaus and Land Registry.
Using this information, the Water4All database can build customer profiles that identify financially vulnerable people and share this with other utility industries such as energy, telecoms and financial services. This innovative and complex solution will enable suppliers to work together in supporting people who are struggling – reaching them in the right way, at the right time.
If companies are unaware that a customer is financially vulnerable, they can’t help, but if they know, they can help and charge customers accurately to prevent unexpected costs. The initiative works on the principle of seek and serve – where the utility companies will identify financially vulnerable individuals, offer help, and save them the worry of repeatedly communicating their situation to multiple suppliers.
The project is in its early stages, having just secured funding for the proof-of-concept element, but it holds great potential to help customers who typically do not reach out or reach out after one year of needing the help. The innovators believe they could help financially stressed customers save up to £2,500 on bills and secure new benefits from better tariffs, water and energy-saving advice and efficiency measures, such as spread-out payment plans.
By helping customers access the full range of support available to them across their utilities, Water4All works towards a sustainable future for everyone – contributing towards customers’ financial wellbeing and promoting more environmentally-friendly water habits.
Don’t work in the water industry but want to get involved? The Water Discovery Challenge will be welcoming groundbreaking innovations from anyone in any sector from January 2023. Find out more here: https://waterinnovation.challenges.org/water-discovery-challenge/
Get more #WaterInspiration by finding out more about previous winners of our innovation competitions at https://waterinnovation.challenges.org/winners
If you would like help partnering with water companies, speak to the UK water industry accelerator – Spring (also a previous winner of our innovation competition). If you have an existing product or service and are interested in becoming a supplier to companies, speak to British Water or the Future Water Association.
