Water & Wastewater Treatment

www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | augusT 2014 | 19 Managing energy usage Wessex Water drives big savings with its Energy Hub O n 20th January 2012, the op- erations team at Wessex Water began to receive automatically- generated notifications warning of problems with the pump performance at a remote, unmanned sewage pumping station. The alarm had been triggered by Wessex Water's monitor- ing and targeting so•ware because of an unusual increase in the amount of energy being used to pump each cubic metre of sewage. The notification prompted an inves- tigation. This showed the problem was due to a pipework leak in the station's valve chamber, which would have remained undiscovered until the sta- tion's next scheduled site visit, some three months hence. Wessex Water estimates the delay would have cost £1,000 in additional electricity charges. What happened at this remote pumping station in 2012 shows the value of combining electricity con- sumption and pump flow data to help identify problems and energy-saving opportunities. Wessex Water has a vast amount of billing and monitoring data from its 2,500 operational sites. Until recently combining this data ef- fectively to identify efficiency and op- erational savings had proved difficult. That has now changed with the launch of the company's Energy Hub. The Energy Hub is the focus of Wes- sex Water's drive to save operational energy. The hub is home to the vast amount of data the company has on electricity consumption, assets, finan- cial reports and site-specific flow rates. It is supported by computer-based in- terfaces – energy dashboards – which are currently being rolled-out to all of Wessex Water's operations team. Designed and programmed by Wes- sex Water's Energy Team the interac- tive dashboards provide the opera- tional business with a user-friendly means to integrate the huge amount of cost and operational data into a single system to help save energy and cut costs. "The energy team are experi- enced in interpreting and analysing complex sets of data; the idea of the dashboards is make it easy for the rest of the business to interpret and analyse that data," says Wessex Water energy services manager Catherine Pedder. The dashboards can be individu- ally configured to show energy data and asset information pertinent to the user's specific role; the chairman, for example, might chose just to have a view of headline data, while the opera- tor responsible for an individual site is able to access information on the per- Project focus ● Energy Hub collects usage data from 2,500 operational sites ● So ware processes more than 23 million rows of consumption data each year ● Models consumption to 99.9% accuracy and is saving hundreds of thousands of pounds Andrew PeArson FrEElancE EdiTor and TEcHnical WriTEr The Energy Hub makes energy information digestible to the operations teams in the field

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