NewsNewsNews – News & UpdatesOfwat Innovation FundReports
July 26, 2024
The Ofwat Innovation Fund has published its Annual Report for 2024 – highlighting 27 new projects, lessons learned and much more to come in 2025. Read more below.
Over the past year, the Ofwat Innovation Fund has awarded funding to a further 27 innovative projects to grow the water sector’s capacity to innovate and to better meet the evolving needs of customers, society and the environment.
This includes:
This has taken our overall number of funded projects to 93. You can find out more about our previous winners on our website.
The River Deep Mountain AI project is set to revolutionise the way we gather insights and data on waterbody pollution – and will accelerate real positive environmental change across our regions.
During 2023-24 we ran our first competition for third party innovators – the Water Discovery Challenge:
Non-thermal plasma is a low-maintenance, affordable process designed to clean water by eliminating persistent and emerging pollutants from any source of water without generating a large carbon footprint. There is no waste created in the process and it ensures forever chemicals are removed before they enter the wider environment.
As with last year, we report on the progress and successes of the Fund so far, while looking to the future and how an innovation ecosystem can be better nurtured in the sector.
Water Breakthrough Challenge 4 brought forward some of the most ambitious and wide-ranging entries seen to date and has continued to foster a spirit of collaboration between water companies and other partners.
We want to continue to encourage a diverse range of projects in future rounds and to see the sector become even more ambitious in introducing new, potentially transformational ideas.
The next round of the Water Breakthrough Challenge will open in September 2024.
Since the last report was published, there has been real movement on many of the funded projects. Some projects have completed their funded work.
The project sought to provide an indication of capital cost, highlighting potential impact on operational cost savings, carbon reduction and increased resilience, and demonstrating the potential effect of better managing these bioresources. By integrating bioresource value chains (the full lifecycle of the bioresource) from Anglian Water and four other water and sewerage companies into a single platform, these objectives were achieved. As a result, this resource can capture the equivalent of around 50% of the total sludge production for England and Wales (Bioresources market information – Ofwat).
The project did this through use of an AI-driven platform (Decisio) to create a dashboard that modelled various scenarios, including potential implementation of carbon penalties and biomethane incentives.
And we are delighted to see some of the completed projects return to win funding for the next stage of their development.
The initiative has been awarded further funding through Ofwat’s Water Breakthrough Challenge 3, which will enable the building of the platform. The goal of the team, which now includes additional partners Icebreaker One and Wessex Water, is to make the first data sets available by the end of 2023. Through Stream 2, the team plans to continuously develop the data-sharing platform over the next 18 months, adding more features to enable a diverse range of use cases. A small group of representatives from individual water companies and outside organisations, the Advisory Group for Market Needs and Use Cases, will prioritise the most valuable use cases to be delivered through the pipeline of cases. The most valuable cases will be assessed in the context of their value to society, the environment and/or the economy
We’ll be continuing to publish case studies of our winning projects on the Innovation Fund website throughout the coming year, to both report the successes through the Fund, and to provide learning opportunities for future projects.
We’ll also be publishing the first of our learning reports that focus on winning projects on particular themes and the lessons that have been learned along the way. Hopefully to help inform even better innovations – including through future rounds of competitions (more on that below).
If the Annual Report, case studies and more have inspired you, the fund will be opening its Water Breakthrough Challenge 5 competition on 9 September. So there’s still time to find your partners and bring together your entry to win a share of £40 million.
There will also be more competitions from 2025 onwards as Ofwat has proposed increasing the Fund to £400 million for 2025-30, increasing the number of competitions and other changes to drive transformative change. So make sure you sign up for our newsletter updates to get the latest news during 2024-25 – including details of future competitions.
