Utility Week

14 | OCTOBER 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Special report Analysis So much more than a pipe Ruth Williams talks to Anglian Water chief executive Peter Simpson about a landmark pipeline project to move bulk water supplies across the east of England. A nglian Water broke ground in August on one of the largest infrastructure projects the water sector has ever seen, which seeks to connect the east of Eng- land north to south to transport water. More than 500km of pipe will move supplies from areas of surplus to some of the driest parts of the region to improve resilience in the face of a changing climate, population pressures and ever tightening abstraction licences. . "It's much, much more than just a pipe, it's a complete system change for how we as Anglian think about and operate the busi- ness," says Anglian Water's chief executive, Peter Simpson. The pipeline was conceived to balance out supply and demand by moving away from serving communities out of single water sources. The company is facing an 85 megalitres a day reduction to its abstraction licences over the next couple of years to pro- tect aquifers, particularly chalk ones. Added to this pressure is the estimated 175,000 new homes due to be built across the region during AMP7, and the impacts of cli- mate change. If the company took no action these combined pressures would see the area's water resources shi‡ from a surplus of around 150 megalitres a day at the beginning of this investment period to a deficit of 30 megalitres a day by 2025. "In light of those challenges, by 2045 the deficit would be 144 megalitres a day," Simp- son says. "So, it brings it into sharp focus, in only a relatively short period we would move from surplus to deficit." Demand management The strategy to meet these needs includes an emphasis on demand management through leakage reduction and more smart metering in the near term while the pipeline in under construction. "Part of the trick we're trying to pull off with the pipeline is to enable us to balance things out. As well as moving water around to balance supply and demand, it also gives resilience," Simpson explains. The project will knit together the system of individual water treatment works serv- ing separate communities to give as many customers as possible at least two sources of supply. This means managing multiple systems while avoiding water quality issues from combining water sources. "The more you get into it, the more you realise how far away from just laying a pipe it really is," Simpson says. He describes it instead as an intelligent smart water system with sensors and monitors feeding data into a digital twin. Integrating existing systems is the complicated part to bring together legacy assets and systems that run on different plat- forms together in a cyber-secure way. "There's a huge opportunity here to build a system with digital capabilities," he explains. "At the heart of this is to come up with a new way of building, operating and maintaining [the network]– the digital twin is integral to that." Anglian formed the Strategic Pipeline Alliance (SPA) between engineering and construction firms Costain, Farrans, Jacobs, and Mott MacDonald Bentley to complete the infrastructure project. SPA director James Crompton says: "Lay- ing the pipe is the big, exciting engineering part, but that's sort of the easy bit. The book- ends at the beginning and end are the really challenging pieces." He adds: "This will be more like the trans- mission system that National Grid would have to move power around a bigger net- work." The alliance team has taken lessons from Crossrail in terms of the complexity of engineering involved and is developing the digital twin in parallel to laying pipes. Spanning multiple separate areas on this scale, the system operation and water qual- ity challenges become more complex. Larger populated centres like Milton Keynes and Northampton already have com- bined systems that need to become more integrated. It means managers sat on the Humber Bank now need a picture of the water needs in Colchester. "They are going to have a much wider responsibility and need to have a digital twin to model different scenarios across multi- ple supply areas," Simpson says. "It's going to mean we need a different organisational approach." SPA will use the digital twin to rehearse how the system will operate, right through commissioning, so the company has the best chance of getting it right first time. Crompton explains that time constraints of completing the project within a single AMP have forced the teams to explore innovative ways of working. "From day one we have worked to the mantra of 'deliberately delivering differ- ently'. Doing this in one single AMP we liter- ally have to do things differently, otherwise we would run out of money, time, carbon – or all three. That's where the digital technol- ogy, learning from construction industries comes in." He outlines the innovative techniques and methods used in the scheme, including welding trials to overcome quality issues; ploughing into fields to lay the pipe directly into the ground, which disturbs the land less and closes up the ground. "The time and cost savings here were huge," Crompton says, adding that the alli- ance partners were key to finding these novel ways of working and carrying out digital tri- als first to allow for unhindered production. The team are considering how to commis- sion the pipeline without flushing the sys- tem, as is traditionally done for quality and hygiene reasons. At this scale, that would require huge amounts of water. "It seems at odds to waste water to test the system with water taken from the envi- ronment when we are trying to conserve it. That forced us to look at waterless commis- sioning," Crompton says. "We have considered what it will look like to not use water for commissioning, at the welding trials we have had to step up our game to create and maintain a factory qual- ity environment. If we can keep everything

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