Digital Water – the need is now

About 3 ? years ago, following a series of conferences, I wrote an article – “The Smart Water Industry is no longer a need ….it’s a must" what I have heard over the past few months at various conferences is that we no longer have a choice…it is a matter of just getting on with it. More and more we have a need for Digital Water/Smart Water to address the challenges that the water industry is facing every day.

In those last few years, we have had a pandemic that has seen the rise to prominence of visualisation techniques with special reference to wastewater-based epidemiology and we have seen pollution scandals (at least in the UK) that has seen more and more demand for real time data and monitoring and for data to open and available in the light of day. More recently we have seen in the revised Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive a European-Wide monitoring of water quality upstream and downstream of wastewater discharges to the environment that is literally going to see tens if not hundreds of billions of Euros spent on water quality monitoring, installation and maintenance.

But there is caution to all of this – we are seeing the emergence of Digital Water but, as said at the recent Digital Water Summit, and something that we all know, whatever we do has to have use and has to have value. Otherwise we might as well make a nice bonfire of all of the money that is going to be invested over the coming decade or so.

What is Digital Water?

It is a term that some will laud as marketing gibberish, and it is a term that even in the past three years has changed and will probably change again in another three years. Some will call it Water 4.0 or Smart Water and the current term is Digital Water but what does it actually mean. Well, if you ask 100 different people you will get 100 different answers.

First we have to differentiate between Digitization , Digitalisation and Digital Transformation.

Digitization – The process of making information available and accessible in a digital format

Digitalisation – The act of making processes more automated through the use of digital

Digital Transformation – The process of devising new business applications that integrate all the digitised data and digitalised applications.

Now, I’ve borrowed these terms of the internet and so, to me, they don’t quite fit what I think of Digital Water initially but at least for the moment they will do. So, to get onto Digital Water what do I think Digital Water actually means?

For me, at least, Digital Water is making the use of the data that the water industry collects and turning it (a) into information and (b) eventually insight for the various users in the water industry and water environment to enable them to make decisions about how they are going to operate. This can be within a water operating company taking a stakeholder engagement approach to identify the informational needs of the person be it the CEO of the company or the operator on the front-line. Both of those stakeholders are going to have different informational needs at different granularity but the data sources are likely to be the same. Outside of the water operating company it can take the form of digital services.

A great example of the Digital Services is from the PrimeWater project which took a number of years to develop the services under a Horizon 2020 Project and it aim?was to deliver enhanced EO-based water quality products for inland waters, through advanced physics-based algorithms that integrate multi- and hyper-spectral imagery from satellite, airborne and in-situ optical sensors. PrimeWater is generate added-value products (e.g. turbidity, total suspended matter, chlorophyll-a) that improve freshwater monitoring and increase the situational intelligence of water managers and downstream water services.

With these services they have increased the situational awareness and enabled enhanced predictive and early water capabilities enabling adaptive management of water resources and of course this is only the start of water Digital Water can achieve.

Breaking the barriers

Anyone who has heard me speak will have heard me talk about Data Quality and I know that I sound like a broken record. I often quote the various famous William Melling phrase of the 1950s that if we put “Garbage In” then we will of course get “Garbage Out.” It was fantastic to see that the data scientists that I met at the British Water Data Conference agreed wholeheartedly on this one. For those of you who haven’t read the IWA White Paper on Instrumentation in Digital Transformation then please do and if you haven’t read it then you might as well read the book (for free) which is available here

We of course have to measure to manage (another old adage) but we have to measure correctly and this means having some sort of analytical quality control and having maintenance procedures and having the skills either embedded in our organisations or the ability to contract them in. Poor data, especially when the quality of that data isn’t known is probably one of the biggest threats to the concept of Digital Water as quite frankly instrumentation if not installed and if not maintained can and will lie. In the advent of open data when the data from instrumentation is going to have to be provided to the public in such a short time that no quality control is possible then the importance of data quality becomes even more paramount.

This places even more emphasis on the second barrier to Digital Water and that is the skill base of the industry or the potential lack of it. In the UK at least the plans that are currently being made for instrumentation in the water industry quite literally outweigh the skilled personnel that is available in the country to (a) deliver the installation schemes and (b) maintain the equipment long-term. This inevitably leads to the phenomenon of “The Resistance to the effective use of instrumentation” where an unmaintained instrument is either not installed correctly or deteriorates in quality due to lack of maintenance and of course is not trusted, this inevitably leads to the lack of trust in data as a whole and the whole Digital Water concept fails. The second area where the industry lacks skill is in two technical areas – firstly that of data science and analysis and secondly the skill to relate the data science to the specific situations within the water industry. A data scientist can develop all sorts of relationships but if you don’t have the technical subject matter expertise to understand what that relationship is telling you then things don’t quite work.

Thirdly is the barrier of expectation. With Digital Water a lot of people are pushing for real time data and up to the minute information of the here and now and the ability to analyse things in minute detail all the time. The evidence of this is the recent drive towards 2-minute monitoring in the UK which will multiply the amount of data by 7.5 times per monitor. This doesn’t sound a lot but when you put it into the context of the regulatory monitoring at a wastewater treatment works for even the most simplest of works (serving greater than 250 people) is going to go from 35,040 pieces of data to 525,600 pieces of data and then you multiply it by the approximately 3,500 sites you get 1.8 billion pieces of data per year and then add on the 5.5 billion pieces of data that is going to be collected in the wastewater network as a minimum all of this to be delivered within one hour. Then there are going to have to be some very large IT systems to be able to make sense from the data and see the wood from the trees. In reality you have to question whether or not this level of data is actually needed and in the majority of situations the answer to the question is of course it isn’t.

What we can’t think of is Digital Water as more and more data. What Digital Water actually should achieve is value from the data sources to inform a situation either for the public good be that through the direct use of information, though something like an alert system that informs people whether a bathing water is safe or something that is longer term and helps the operational efficiency of the water operator helping to reduce the environmental impact.

What did surprise me in the industry musings at the most recent of the conferences is the determination of the water industry to not let the barriers get in the way. Data quality can (and must) be managed, skills must be developed and the expectation on Digital Water be realised where possible and expectations managed where the current state of the technology cannot or should not deliver where there is no need or no value.

None of the barriers are insurmountable and in real terms the solutions take time to develop. The PrimeWater project took five years, the Digital Twin that has been developed on the water distribution network in Valencia by Idrica took ten years both of these due to the iterative nature of the solutions that means something has to be developed, and its function observed and then developed again. Once part of the solution is developed more and more becomes visible and so Digital Water, at least in some ways, can be seen as organic.

Enormous potential

We have to remember that Digital Water is in fact a series of tools that are designed to give us all a situational awareness of what is happening be this in a water operators system be it treating water for drinking or returning water back to the environment and assuring public safety or be it in helping to determine and effectively control the next pandemic that is on the horizon. The water industry faces challenges that it has never faced before and is having to manage these. Digital tools are amongst the tools that can and will help us to both measure and manage the situation.

What we have to figure out is where the tools can help to make the most impact. This isn’t a factor of just using technology for technologies sake, we have to remember that technology is not at the centre of Digital Water but alongside the technological developments is both the need to help and involve people and also at the centre is the needs of businesses too as at the end of the day the use of Digital Water has to have value.

Addressing climate change and the race to Net Zero

There is a virtual global promise, especially in the water industry, for everyone to achieve “Net Zero” or in short to limit are environmental impact towards climate neutrality. The water industry is a huge consumer of carbon and in fact the wastewater treatment side of the industry can also produce greenhouse gases such as Nitrous Oxide which is particularly damaging to the environment.

However, there are a range of technologies that have helped the industry to control treatment systems to maximise the treatment for the energy consumed using combinations of Real Time Control Systems, Multi-variate process control and analysers which will control treatment systems to limit the environmental impact from nitrous oxide by measuring and control to limit the production.

On top of these the control systems that are available for biosolids treatment can maximise the energy production to ensure that wastewater treatment plants can, in some cases not only achieve energy neutrality but in some rare case (that are hopefully increasing) can actually be energy positive by producing more electricity than they actually consume whilst producing an excellent quality of effluent.

Put this together with a product or factory approach for the wastewater treatment system and the outcome that can be achieved from a wastewater treatment plant is actually of a benefit to society by considering it a resource factory.

The wastewater treatment plant isn’t alone in limiting the energy that is used a similar approach can be taken limiting pumping in potable water networks by ensuring that there is sufficient water to satisfy the public’s needs limiting pumping operations to outside of peak periods of electricity and balancing the stresses on the electrical distribution grids as well as controlling the pressure in water distribution mains to limit leakage and thus saving precious resources. The Digital Twin approach has been used in this regard.

Addressing Pollution

In the UK at least the pollution scandal and, at least part of the blame, being put onto the water industry has resulted from the increased monitoring of the wastewater systems through the use of event duration monitoring. Taking the issue of data quality to one side it is clear that the river environment isn’t in the state that it should be in and there are some issues to resolve within the aquatic environment. Add to this level of monitoring the current monitoring that is being added then there are a range of wastewater network services that are starting to be developed. My own thoughts of 4 years ago having a wastewater network that can balance flows across a 24-hour period (as long as the storage capacity is available) and calming the wastewater network so that the flows are passed to wastewater treatment works in a balanced way are becoming a reality.

Alert systems tied to hyperlocal forecasting ensure protection of the environment by (a) acting as blockage prediction and (b) having the potential to control the network to save both the aquatic environment as well as the environment more generally by reducing the impact of the system as a whole and limiting the energy that is consumed.

Digital Services

More and more the potential of Digital Service to not just the water industry but more holistically to the aquatic environment are starting to develop. The PrimeWater project using Earth Observation is a classic example of this and then are opportunities to do a lot more. The PERTE for Water Industry investment programme in Spain is starting to talk about Digital River Basins and along with the overflow monitoring (which hopefully will be river water quality monitoring) has the potential to be revolutionary and realise some of the aims that the water industry has had for decades in terms of dynamic permitting and dynamic abstraction of river waters for potable water treatment depending upon both water resources and source water quality creating a methodology for simpler water treatment and limiting the environmental impact of water treatment works ensuring that the environmental outcome is realised for the supply of potable water. This is only one potential thought for river basin management which a Digital Service can bring. Let alone the various technologies that exist for leak detection using Earth Observation as another starter for 10.

A Digital Future

It is very clear that Digital Water has become a must that the water industry must deliver now, at least in some areas. There have been uses that are becoming more and more mainstream. The use of Digital Water tools for leakage reduction is becoming a normality. Some area are not quite at Business as Usual but are being adopted rapidly, such as Real-Time Control, to limit the environmental impact that the water industry quite naturally has and some technologies are only starting to be developed now and the mainstream services that will fall out of these developments are not being realised as yet but have the potential in the short to medium term future. What is clear is that the Digital Water tools, if developed correctly and the warning signs heeded, has a great opportunity to improve not only the aquatic environment but more generally the environment as a whole.