Over the next 15 years the UK's largest utility, Thames Water, aims to install around three million smart water meters, initially in a number of London suburbs. Here the metering technology manager, Martin Hall, outlines more details of the plan and the challenges that come with it.
These are exciting times for the UK’s biggest water and wastewater company. With 15 million customers, and a turnover of £1.9bn ($2.7bn) a year, the scale of Thames Water’s operation means constant challenges for its engineers and the closest scrutiny of its performance.
On a daily basis, it meets these challenges head-on, delivering an average of 2,600 million litres of water every day. But despite the popular perception of London as an area of high rainfall, it’s actually classified as seriously water-stressed.
As a consequence, the UK Government has granted water companies in the South East the power to develop a programme of progressive metering.
This has given Thames Water the chance to embark on a radical and wide-ranging project designed to address the shortfall in water supply that is predicted given London’s current rate of growth and its anticipated level of consumption. By 2020 this could amount to 133 million litres a day.
The aim is nothing less than a fundamental and innovative overhaul of household metering on a scale unlike anything seen before in the UK. Over the next 15 years, the company plans to install around three million smart water meters, initially in a number of London suburbs. These devices will enable Thames Water customers to take control over their water usage but other benefits will include:
- Improvements in billing information so that all bills are now based on the use of actual readings, instead of rateable values of property
- Giving customers a better understanding of their water use and helping them to understand ways they can manage consumption and influence the size of their bills
- Offering an opportunity for interaction, including incentive tariffs to help customers share in the benefits of water saving
- The identification of customer water supply problems such as continuous use, which could indicate wastage or leakage. Further reducing leakage, which is already down a third since 2004, continues to be an integral part of Thames Water’s business strategy and 25% of leakage comes from customers’ pipes
- Better monitoring of water in the network to properly understand where water is going for the first time and identify leaks more efficiently so they can be repaired faster
- Enhancing water network operations, through the use of sensors including pressure and temperature, to better understand how the network is performing and make improvements.
The decision to move to a smart meter solution dates back to the company’s water resources management plan of 2014 and an evaluation of the additional cost of a ‘smart’ meter system, with its new technology and back office systems to hold the data, over a conventional ‘dumb’ system. It was felt the benefits, outlined above, outweighed the extra expense.
During 2014, Thames Water examined the different options available on the market and made its decision in March 2015, opting for an end-to-end system that included new digital meters, a radio-based fixed network data capture system, data management and secure transfer to the company’s systems. Key to the choice was finding a system with a 15-year life to ensure the new digital meters would last as long as existing technology.
