Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | JUNE 2021 | 37 Analysis Rolling out a smarter water future in London Ruth Williams talks to Thames Water's Mark Cooper, who heads smart metering, about the company reaching the 'game changing' milestone of installing half a million devices. T hames was the first UK water company to begin wide-scale deployment of fully smart water meters, known as AMI or advanced metering infrastructure. These differ from the automatic meter reading (AMR) such as drive-by reads that have been adopted more widely across the country, which are themselves a significant step-up in terms of usage data compared to manually reading meters in the street. Over the past six years the company has increased its meter penetration from around 34 per cent to 49 per cent, which Cooper explains was compulsory under the water resource management plan. "Metering really is the cornerstone of our strategy around our water resources manage- ment plan," Cooper says. "It's about really punching home the message of taking less water from the environment and securing water supplies for future generations." Moving customers to a meter generally results in water savings, however Cooper says the granular level of data gives further incremental saving when moving to an AMI smart meter. "We hope to move up from what is a standard 12 per cent saving going from unmetered to metered and pushing that up to 15-17 per cent saving with the smart meters by giving customers an additional view of their usage." The data available to Thames on usage has shot up from the two million reads from the "dumb" meter estate the business previ- ously had access to, to 12 million every day. The system uses 106 radio masts distrib- uted across the capital operated by Arqiva, and in April the company celebrated a 500,000-installation milestone, a develop- ment Cooper describes as "game changing". Insight and engagement Cooper explains that the data is valuable beyond simply understanding what a house- hold is using: continuous flow indicates a leak in a home, driveway or path. The com- pany then engages with customers in a new way to tell them what the impact on their bill is of continuous flow and to encourage them to check sinks and toilets for any problems. "Around 70 per cent of customers are now fixing the problem a•er learning continuous flow could massively impact their bill. We've had incidents of these being repaired within hours of receiving a letter about it," Cooper says. "It's a real call to action, all built around the message that water is a precious resource." The smart meters have highlighted that around 30 per cent of leakage was happen- ing in or around homes but also give a far richer picture of the whole supply area. "Before, we were putting a lot of water into an area and only knew where 20-30 per cent of it was going because that's the num- ber of metered properties, but now we're increasing meter penetration so we know where 80 per cent of our water is going. That helps us really effectively target leakage detection on the network." The company has begun linking smart meter data with acoustic logger data and other devices to better target leakage across networks. That information can be compiled and analysed to understand where water is going, how much is consumed and what is wastage. Data overload? The jump from bi-annual reads to hourly means billpayers can engage with metering and data at deeper levels, but how interested are they? Cooper believes the key is to design smart tools that allow people to interact with their usage at a level that suits individual households. "The meter is just an enabler to a longer- term smart relationship with our customers around consumption, which when they're unmeasured is very difficult to have," he says. "The difference between smart energy and water meters is not just the customer lens, but the lens that looks back and helps us with our own leakage challenge in our network." During AMP7 the company and its part- ner Morrisons Utility Services will install 660,000 meters with a plan to move up to around 70 per cent penetration across the whole estate in the next 10-15 years. Getting into those hard to reach places The goal of 70 per cent penetration is limited by the number of hard to meter properties in London. Challenges include blocks of flats and converted buildings for which the water supply is partly or wholly shared; insuf- ficient space to install meters; separating pipework configurations from neighbouring properties. In some locations Thames can install bulk supply meters on to shared properties to measure water going in by creating a small supply area within a larger one that indicates any continuous flow to identify leakage. Ruth Williams, water correspondent Thames' AMII provides granular detail The full version of this article is available to Utility Week subscribers at: www.utilityweek.co.uk

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