Utility Week

36 | SEPTEMBER 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Event You must respect the data A Utility Week roundtable, held in association with AWS, brought together senior executives to discuss the challenge of balancing resilience and innovation – and the role technology can play. P articipants at a roundtable hosted by Utility Week, in association with Ama- zon Web Services (AWS), were clear that the utilities sector has a long way to go in gathering and utilising data. As one suc- cinctly put it: "We don't respect data. It's not treated as an asset." The collection of senior figures responsi- ble for asset strategies, innovation, business resilience and analytics across eight water and energy networks also agreed that greater collaboration was needed to unlock the potential of data in delivering on common goals, most notably decarbonisation. Some underlined the fact that co- operation needs to extend beyond utilities, and even supply chains, to embrace other service providers, including those building the next generation of infrastructure. A head of environment at one water com- pany said companies such as AWS were in some ways at the same point the water sector was 150 years ago. "You are building infrastructure that is going to be absolutely intrinsic to the way we live our lives. Just like the Victorians, you can't be expected to know what the future will look like. "But, when you look at what they did over a century ago, it was done with a sub- stantial eye to the future. "The question for information services is which parts are inevitably going to become redundant and which parts are still going to be in use in 100 years time?" Bringing the debate back to the present century, the participants discussed the need to establish better understanding of how their assets are performing and how they can be optimised. The head of analytics at an energy net- work pointed to the fact that low visibility of the low-voltage network was a significant barrier. Their company's machine learning models are based on sensors in less than 10 per cent of substations, while they do not have access to consumption data. They said: "We're talking about a future in which you have a much wider group of actors connecting with the network. We've got to know that the network can take it but at the moment we don't have that full visibility." Use what you've got An asset strategy manager at another distri- bution network agreed that access to data was an issue but warned "some companies are seeking to get perfect data and they sim- ply won't get there". They added: "It's not just about improv- ing the data, it's about convincing people at decision level that we can trust this data even if it isn't perfect. Energy is a conserva- tive industry, that's natural when you're dealing with critical infrastructure. But it means there's a nervousness about making a decision when we're only 70 per cent certain of the data. "Decision-makers have to understand you don't need to get your data perfect to make decisions." They added that the thinking around data needed to change at every level throughout utility companies. "We'll get better data by really clearly explaining to the people out there collect- ing the data why it's so important. So, the job isn't complete when you've gone and repaired something, it's complete when you've put all the updated asset information into the system through your tablet." On the need to share data, one energy executive pointed out that the desire is there but the heavy restrictions around security made this incredibly difficult. However, they accepted that sharing innovations and new ways of working should be a priority. A departmental head at a water company said collaboration had always been one of the sector's strong points but expressed scepticism that the same level of cooperation would be possible with outside parties. "Because we do not have that history of being in competition with each other, collab- oration comes naturally to us. To the extent that it seems to surprise some people from other industries. I'm not sure that culture could be replicated in a directly competitive market." While collaboration may be an historic trend within the water sector, one asset director said that notions of whole-systems thinking had taken longer to embed in com- pany cultures. They said: "There are huge opportunities if we can step outside of some of the mind- sets we've stuck with in the water sector in terms of looking at things in silos. "As we work to reduce emissions from processes there are exciting new doors open- ing up all the time that really fundamentally change what a water company is and does. If you look at wastewater, you've got hydrogen

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