Utility Week

38 | JUNE 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Analysis The marketplace of ideas Measuring whole-life carbon a game changer A nglian's successful bid for funding from Ofwat's Innovation in Water Challenge is to develop a tool to measure the whole-life carbon and costs of assets Anglian, its seven capital delivery part- ners in the @One Alliance, and Welsh Water are developing the tool, which they say has the potential to be "a real game changer for the industry" in the sector's journey to net zero. Lindsey Taylor, innovation manager at Anglian, explains that the two-year project will create a tool to measure the whole-life carbon of an asset to inform design and investment teams in making sustainable long-term decisions. "At the moment as an organisation we're absolutely brilliant at measuring and manag- ing capital carbon and operational carbon, but we look at those in isolation without tending to consider maintenance or end of life," Taylor says. "We realised that no-one in the sector is doing this. We're all talking about whole-life carbon and connecting up carbon with cost, but there are no tools to enable us to measure whole-life carbon." She says the aim is to enable the industry to make informed decisions about assets. "The project is about facilitating the industry's move away from purely capital and operational carbon accounting to true whole-life carbon cost management. It aims to develop digital visualisation tools that put carbon at the heart of our decision-making processes – in design teams or governance teams, they can make more informed deci- sions with whole-life data." Over two years the project will develop a whole-life carbon database by adding information on the carbon impact of main- tenance, replacement and end of life to existing data sets on operational and capital carbon. That will then be connected with cost databases for the first time in the sector before integrating these into the design stage for teams working on the building information modelling (BIM). "Once we've connected all those things we can start to create the visual project environment for our design teams so they can start to make really informed live deci- sions where they see high carbon and cost hotspots in their design. That's where I truly think the power is in this project." Some of these data sets do exist, for example Anglian has a carbon modeller that looks at capital and operational carbon, but the tool will allow that to be updated with emissions factors, new materials and other information. "This tool really puts sustainability and long-term thinking at the heart of our pro- cesses," she says. "We've got to do this, otherwise we're doomed when it comes to climate change, so we have to provide our teams with the right tools to make informed decisions. We ask a lot of our engineering community in terms of cost, carbon and expect them to balance all those things, so this tool should make it more straight- forward and obvious for them." Taylor explains that the collaboration with Welsh Water will be important to chal- lenge how the team at Anglian approaches the work and to represent the voice of other water companies to ensure the finished tool will work for the wider sector. Since beginning the work Taylor's team has been approached by multiple other At the end of April, Ofwat announced the 11 winners of the first round of its Innovation in Water Challenge. The winning bids were each led by a water company, supported by a range of partners. Projects ranged from planting and restoring seagrass meadows, a scheme to turn ammonia in wastewater into green hydrogen gas to software that can monitor the degradation of wildlife habitats. Other ideas focused on preventing leaks using AI, CCTV, and unexploited optical fibre strands in telecoms networks. As part of a series of features on the 11 projects, Ruth Williams talks to Anglian and Affinity.

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