Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
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14 | MAY 2017 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk Industry leader David Rose, Energy & Carbon Manager, South West Water "Certifi cation has really helped staff engage with the energy agenda… I feel we've got a framework to work with." permanent, something that gave us a framework for energy management," says Rose. "With ESOS audits, the danger is that you do them and put them on the shelf and everyone forgets about them until four years' time - and we de• nitely didn't want that to be the case. With ISO50001 it is a continuous improvement process; it's working away in the background all the time." South West Water's parent company Pennon Group had also just acquired Bournemouth Water, with the intention of merging its operations with SWW, so the timing was good to implement a single certi• cation process for both companies. An initial certi• cation audit in September 2015, which led to certi• cation in December 2015, was just the start of the journey, because the utility needs to demonstrate that it is making continuous progress to manage down its power use through an improvement plan. One of the central elements of South West Water's ongoing plan is rolling out submetering, in order to gain more data about energy use at its sites and identify opportunities from this. The utility has 1800 sites in total, of which 450 have a main half-hourly meter; the biggest 100 of these sites account for 75-80% of its energy use. At these large sites, SWW plans to • t a sub-meter to each asset or process de• ned as a Signi• cant Energy User (SEUs) under ISO50001. Many pumps and aerators fall into this category and at larger treatment sites the number of SEUs can run well into double • gures. "We are working our way through those sites putting in submeters on all the SEUs that we identify, so we will have much better data," says Rose. "We are at the very start of that journey - we've submetered six or seven of the sites to date. In fact, our initial plans may have been a little ambitious: we thought we could do about 15-20 sites a year, so that over a • ve-year period we would have the complete set of 100 sites. But as it turns out, on some sites we've identi• ed up to 30 SEUs, so putting a submeter on each of those SEUs is more expensive and time- consuming than we thought. "But once in place, the submeters give us much better visibility of data. We can interrogate that data, look at the nominal e™ ciencies of those units and we can intervene at much earlier A s the sector's most signi• cant overhead cost, managing energy use in water companies has never been more important - but ensuring that it remains front of mind in a large business with hundreds of sites and thousands of staš is a complex challenge. So it was a big step when South West Water decided to seek ISO50001 certi• cation for its energy management practices in mid-2015 – committing the company to a continuous improvement process in reducing and managing its energy and carbon consumption. The international certi• cation requires a comprehensive year-round approach to energy saving, going much further than the requirements of the government's Energy Saving Opportunities Scheme (ESOS) which involves audits every four years which may or may not be acted upon. However, David Rose, Energy & Carbon Manager at the Exeter-based utility, is in no doubt that it was a step well worth taking. "The reason for us to go down this route rather than just do the standard ESOS audit was that we wanted something that was a bit more Interview by James Brockett