Original title: Water Neutrality at NAV Sites
Funding amount: £2,898,000
Led by: Affinity Water
Partners: Albion Water Limited, Aquality Trading & Consulting Ltd, BUUK Infrastructure UK No 2 Ltd, Grapviners Ltd, H2OiQ Ltd, Hydraloop International, Propelair – Phoenix Product Development Ltd, SDS Ltd, Skewb.
See project updates on the Project Zero website.
This project will deliver a sustainable, water-saving solution in response to new housing developments being built. Winning £2.9 million, this project will minimise water demand and offset water consumption with new technologies, to ensure the total water use in the community remains the same as it was before the new homes were built. We will manage the usage and offset requirements across three sites by installing water saving devices in residential properties – shower heads, tap inserts and larger infrastructure such as greywater recycling and rainwater harvesting units. This will minimise demand in customers’ homes. We will also install larger technologies on commercial buildings like schools and leisure centres – for example greywater recycling and ultra low flush toilets. This will offset customer usage and maintain existing baseline network demand. We will also be monitoring at a detailed level the patterns and trends of usage. This will allow us to adopt an open-data approach and share anonymised insights in water usage with the wider innovation market.
In the last quarter, we published the results for Site 2 and actively disseminated our findings by attending six conferences and engaging in numerous one-on-one meetings with regulators, water companies, housing developers amongst other stakeholders. We estimate reaching approximately 500-1,000 individuals face-to-face and Social Media reach: Impressions: 15202 Likes:805 Repost: 23 We have commenced the deployment of smart metering for Site 2 and initiated discussions on data management and insights. A slight delay occurred as we explored collaboration with our internal team for the smart metering rollout, aiming to find efficiencies and save resources. We are preparing to publish our economic modelling analysis for Site 2 and the NAV insights report soon. In terms of open data, we are aligning our efforts with the STREAM initiative and working internally to bring this project to fruition. Our engagement in risk mitigation continues to grow, with plans to update regulators post-election. Additionally, we are finalising legal agreements with new project partners, Southern Water and Urban & Civic. Although these negotiations have caused some delays, we are committed to catching up on any lost time and advancing our project objectives efficiently.
In the last quarter we commenced our smart meter rollout with 507 meters installed, alongside utilisation of B4T’s innovative jellyfish solution, enabling network connectivity as part of a smart network. We worked with IWNL to understand data integration and foundations for a consumer app and collaborated with our internal teams to use smart network data to produce a monitoring dashboard for sites with water neutrality requirements. We have finalised install dates with retailers and their customers to complete our offsetting work stream, with an evaluation report to be produced following. We are engaged in legal discussions with Southern Water on undertaking a trial for the water savings market, due to regulatory requirements in North Sussex area. We have defined strategy for site 1, Chigwell (Oaklands). Due to regulatory barriers, we will undertake a desktop study in collaboration with Albion Water. We will explore data available from the dual networked and metered sites. We are working with Urban&Civic to formalise Site 3 requirements and benefits of a water reuse systems. We have completed our economic modelling assessment for site 2 which sees fantastic offsetting results, as well as our open data paper which sets out our open data strategy.
For more information on Project Zero, take a look at the following resources:
