Water & Wastewater Treatment

12 | OCTOBER 2015 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk Events 'Clear drivers' for water industry to invest in demand response T here is huge latent potential for the water industry to work with energy providers on demand response, and clear financial incen- tives for water companies to do more, delegates at WWT's Water Industry Energy & Carbon Management confer- ence heard. Demand response – where large energy users such as water companies are contracted to power down or switch to their own generation at peak times and other times when the network needs it – is expected to have an ever greater role to play in the coming years because of trends in energy generation, Nigel Fox, Energy Strategy and Policy lead at National Grid, told the conference in Birmingham. "All our modelled scenarios point away from synchronous power plants towards more non-synchronous generation from sources such as wind and solar," said Fox. "Between now and 2020 we will need new tools and to further develop our approaches to balance the system." He said there was a clear opportunity for water companies to become more involved. Matthew Pluke, Energy Manager at Anglian Water, said that Anglian had been involved with demand response since the 1990s and that it was now worth around £2M to the business each year. It is a key part of the company's response to the 'energy trilemma' of the need to reduce costs, reduce carbon emissions and increase resilience. Anglian has provided demand response under the standing reserve (STOR) system for the last decade, said Pluke, but in the last two years it has heightened its participation via 'Project Falcon' – a tie-up with Western Power Distribution to trial a smart grid approach – and through a trial of the newer Demand Side Balancing Reserve (DSBR) scheme. The return on investment for water companies can be swi˜. Pluke presented a case study of a typical water treatment plant which was fitted with generators that it could switch to when required under the demand response scheme. Installing the equipment involved a capital cost of £110,000 but it resulted in £27,000 in payments each year, a payback period for Anglian of just four years. "There is a huge amount of latent potential for demand response within Anglian Water, and we are just one water company, so multiply that by ten and you get a sense of the massive capability around the country," said Pluke. By James Brockett THE SPEAKERS To take away 1. National Grid requirements in the coming years are likely to provide opportunities for water companies to profit from demand response 2. The government's recent move to scrap the Feed-in-Tariff has made solar projects less attractive, but utilities are looking at wind installations and private wire connections 3. An evaluation suggests that the CRC carbon reduction scheme has led to a 3-5% reduction in electricity usage among large users in the past year 4. Advanced analytics now allow sites' energy use to be optimised, but a lack of asset standardisation is a barrier 5. Water companies are confident of compliance with ESOS ahead of the December deadline but sceptical of long term benefits to their business "We are in a big data world… but in water, 20% of asset data is wrongly mapped, and 30% of the data has value errors." Les Dawson Adviser Wipro EcoEnergy Water Industry Technology and Innovation conference, December 1st, Birmingham. Details: wwt-innovation.net NEXT EVENT "Many survey participants felt the successive changes to the CRC scheme had made compliance much more complicated." Mike Denbigh Technical Lead, CRC Efficiency Scheme Environment Agency "I can't think of many industries where a key process [activated sludge] being 100 years old would be celebrated as a good thing." Maxine Mayhew Commercial Director Northumbrian Water "We have cut our teeth on Feed-in-Tariff and ROC, and we are now moving into a world where the government does not have a say in what we are doing." Nick Boyle CEO, Lightsource

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