Utility Week

22 | 21ST - 27TH FEBRUARY 2020 | UTILITY WEEK utilities move towards greater automation and 24-7 intelligent support operations assisted by technology. Rohit Gupta, vice president and head of energy and utilities in Europe at technology consulting fi rm Cognizant comments: "Cus- tomer services will see the large-scale use of automation technologies such as AI and machine learning, whether to increase back off ice eff iciencies, improve the level of self-service or provide consistent customer experience across multiple channels. "Utilities are also expected to invest more heavily in building cognitive technologies with a view to mov- ing towards virtual agents [a more intelligent form of chatbot]." But the gods of technology are notoriously fi ckle and uncertainty surrounds what solutions will eventually enter mainstream use. A recent survey of senior industry fi gures, carried out by Utility Week, in association with global technology consultancy Wipro, found that over a third of technology and innovation leaders do not yet have a clear vision of the role technology will play in how they meet their industry's challenges. Part of the problem may be the nebulous nature of discussions around innovation which can become clouded by media hype and insuff icient evidence of the benefi ts. e regulatory regime has also been criticised for failing to suff iciently encourage innovation or take a longer-term view. at said, 2020 will be a year of increasing experi- mentation as utilities seek to move beyond pilots and testbeds to reap real transformational rewards. So what are the big areas of change and how will these develop in 2020? W i l l A I a n d d a t a a n a l y t i c s p r e v e n t l e a k s a n d o u t a g e s ? Fault prediction and dynamic maintenance is a key use case for AI as utilities seek to exploit vast amounts of available smart data to more accurately forecast damage or equipment failures. Northumbrian Water is using machine learning to process supervisory control and data acquisition data, and data from telemetry installed in its water treat- ment works, to predict when equipment is likely to fail. e data is sent every 30 seconds to Microsoft's Azure cloud services platform where algorithms process it to detect when assets are showing signs of deterioration. When a certain threshold is reached, a job is created in the water company's asset management system instructing operatives to go out and maintain it. Nigel Watson at Northumbrian Water says: "It's about following a much more intelligent approach of understanding how the asset is actually performing and creating maintenance jobs accordingly, rather than just scheduling maintenance every month, every quarter or every half year when it may not be needed." Business consulting fi rm CGI worked with a European utility to develop a system that uses machine learn- ing and AI to monitor and manage the performance of renewable energy resources, particularly wind farms, and identify any fault or pre-fault conditions. Humans are kept in the loop to examine any exceptions fl agged by the system and decide if action is required. According to Richard Hampshire, head of energy and utilities at CGI, it is helping them move from a reactive maintenance regime to preventative, proactive maintenance "with potentially signifi cant savings". As part of a £71 million investment to cut leakage, Yorkshire Water is trialling a smart analytics system to identify leaks in its network around Hebden Bridge and west Sheff ield. Remote monitoring specialists Servelec Technologies and water consultant Artesia Consulting interrogate real-time fl ow and pressure data to identify disruptions to normal patterns, which are fl agged and passed to the water fi rm to investigate. Northumbrian Water is doing a lot of work on developing sensors to give early warning of problems on the network. e company's head of Innovation Angela MacOscar, says: " ere will be an explosion in the water sector in terms of the amount of sensor activity going on, and 2020 is the year this will happen." ere's certainly much going on in this fi eld, and we can expect to see adoption accelerate in 2020. at said, AI is only in its fi rst phase of implementa- tion and new layers of intelligence will be added as the technology and potential use cases for it evolve. AI might be ground breaking at this stage, but it's certainly providing a mechanism for off ering greater insight into problems like leakages. utilities move towards greater automation and 24-7 intelligent support operations assisted by technology. Rohit Gupta, vice president and head of energy and utilities in Europe at technology consulting fi rm Cognizant comments: "Cus- tomer services will see the large-scale use of automation

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