Water & Wastewater Treatment

14 | JUNE 2017 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk Water companies put their PR19 focus on resilience James Brockett reports from Birmingham B uilding resilience will be the big theme of the coming PR19 price review, but water companies will pursue different approaches to demonstrating and measuring it, industry figures told the WWT Water Industry Asset Management conference. Operational resilience does not just mean assets that can cope with and recover from adverse events - such as floods, droughts and cyber attacks – but providing a water service to customers that shows "resilience in the round", David Black, Senior Director of Water 2020 at Ofwat, told the conference. This means both planning for and anticipating risks, and containing the impact and restoring service quickly when they occur, he said. "Resilience is not preventing impact on customers of every bad thing, but predicting when those bad things might occur, preparing for them and being ready to respond," he said. The same was true of adverse events that would have an impact on ecosystems, he added. Mark Worsfold, Director of Asset Management at South West Water, said that PR19 business plans would need to ensure resilience was prominent and that this would cover financial, corporate and operational resilience, although there would be most emphasis on the third of these. Floods and droughts would be the most high profile risks, where important metrics would include the level of storm rainfall assets can cope with, the number of days water storage in droughts, the duration of interruptions to supply and the proportion of supplies that rely on a single water source. However other risks are more difficult to measure, and in any case it is difficult to measure the response to an events that may not happen regularly, he said. Andrew Dunbar, Water Strategy Manager at Scottish Water, talked about how his company had built resilience into its 2015-21 business plan. He said that the process started by defining the risk appetite – e.g. how many customers you might be willing to accept would be taken out of service by an event – a'er which you can assess the service impact of the risks and how the system profile might need to change. Research has shown that individuals believe that being cut off from water for 48 hours was the most they were willing to accept, a number which falls to 24 hours for a large community, he said. "The five-year price review period should not be an excuse for companies not to take a longer-term approach to asset planning." David Black Senior Director Water 2020, Ofwat "Because we face such a diverse range of risks, we can't simply gather all those risks together and pass them to any one organisation." Andy Clark Head of Procurement & Contract Management, Yorkshire Water THE SPEAKERS To take away 1. Water companies are building resilience enhancements into their PR19 business plans, but are likely to develop different approaches to this and there is not yet consensus on how some key aspects of resilience should be measured 2. Ofwat wants water companies to look beyond the restrictions of the five-year price review process and to plan for long term risks, considering how impacts on both customers and the environment can be planned for, mitigated and recovered from 3. However, affordability will continue to be a concern in PR19 and the regulator is unlikely to approve new spending for resilience improvements that should in its judgement have been made in previous AMP periods 4. Consideration of natural capital, rather than just financial and built capital, is likely to be a feature of PR19 5. Seeking to pass on as much financial risk to contractors as possible might make sense from a procurement perspective but is not the best way of promoting optimal or innovative solutions "Asset management planning felt confined to the dustbin in PR14... but it's now back in fashion, and long-term resilience feels like the new black." Adrian Rees, Director, Asset Management, AECOM "Our approach to asset creation absolutely demands collaboration at every stage of the process." Jason Tucker Director of Alliances and Integrated Supply Chain, Anglian Water The Talk: events Here is the new design. Any enquires should be sent to: sean.austen@ksb.com 01278 458 686

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