Utility Week

28 | JANUARY 2023 | UTILITY WEEK Water Analysis The tech exists to find leaks, so why don't we use it? Three billion litres of water are lost to leakage every day, so the need to find and fix bursts is urgent, but are innovative solutions being given the support they need? I f I see another person walking down the street with a bloody listening stick, next firework night it's not going to be a Guy Fawkes, I'm going to build a bonfire for lis- tening sticks," says the woman on a mission to rid the world of leaky pipes. Victoria Edwards is chief executive of Fido, a company that uses artificial intelli- gence (AI) to pinpoint the size and location of leaks, and she is in no doubt about the scale of the challenge facing the sector. Up to 95% of leaks are underground, but they're no secret. Regulators, politicians and customers alike bash the sector for leakage. The three billion litres of water lost each day could go a long way to meeting the looming water deficits in England and Wales. So isn't it time to change the narrative from looking inward, to outward? Edwards passionately believes it is. "We live in a world where we will run out of water," she says starkly. "No other indus- try wastes so much of what it produces. In a world where up to 40% of potable water is lost to leakage, we should all get the sack." In England and Wales we know demand will outstrip supply by the 2040s. "The answer to shortages isn't to abstract more water," Edwards argues. "Fix your leakage." This is Fido's and Edwards' mission, to rid the world of leaks. "We're going to be dis- ruptive to end water scarcity and we're going to keep bashing heads to get there." She says Fido sought to deliberately change the nature of the industry through its data-as-a-service model. "We will only solve leakage as global problem with open data and being non-proprietary technology." The Fido AI system can use any audio file to tell if there is a leak in the pipe and what size it is. This approach, Edwards says, can raise any utility company in the world up to the standards of the best by sharing the learnings from one of the most sophisticated networks in the world. Fido's leg up came via the United Utilities Innovation Lab and Edwards acknowledges the technology would not be here without this opportunity. "We managed to build an AI model based on some of the most complex networks in the world. As long as there's water in a pipe, we can tell you if there's a leak, the size of it, and using our bugs, we can tell the exact location of the leak." For utilities that do not have sensors, Fido will give them away. It developed listening bugs that feedback to the AI and can work in any water pipe. Part of the solution In the UK leakage rates fell post-privatisation but then plateaued. Former chief executive of Ofwat, Rachel Fletcher, told a parliamen- tary inquiry that "everyone took their eye off the ball". It was a key focus of the 2019 price review and each company was set an ambi- tious goal to drive down the amount of water lost by 16%. Regulatory pressure yielded innovation and advances in how the sector approached its challenge. But in 2021/22 an average of three billion litres of water was still being lost each day to leaks in England and Wales – the equivalent to 1,212 Olympic-sized swimming pools. By the 2050s we could be facing a daily deficit of 3.4 billion litres. The UK is not alone in the challenges it faces. In Chile, for example, 60-70% of drink- ing water is lost to leaks and of that potable water, much is then consumed by lithium mining. Edwards says this is a global crisis but it is one that UK water companies could be world leaders in. "

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