Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
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www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | JUNE 2018 | 25 • THE POTENTIAL A merican business consulting firm Frost & Sullivan recently issued an analysis on the global smart meter market that predicated total installations will grow from 13.8 million units in 2017 to 82.1 million units by 2026, representing a major growth opportunity for IoT-enabled meters. Frost & Sullivan's senior research analyst for energy and environment, Paul Hudson, says advanced water utilities around the world are now implementing smart water meter projects but – for now at least – cost remains one drawback for NB-IoT. "It operates in a licensed bandwidth and hence the usage will incur a cost in comparison to other non-cellular LPWAN technologies like LoRa or SigFox, but the rapid rise in penetration of NB-IoT and its seamless connectivity alongside regular 3G networks is expected to bring down cost as the number of devices connected through NB-IoT increases," Hudson says. Elsewhere in the world, utilities that have been early adopters of NB-IoT include Australia's South East Water and Spain's Aguas de Valencia; both have worked with Huawei alongside network provider Vodafone to develop the necessary network infrastructure and capabilities. To meet SEW's requirements, Huawei brought in Chinese device partners Huizhong and Sanchuan to develop its meters, which feature different sensors that measure flow, temperature, pressure and vibration. Both companies have seen positive results. However, Hudson still expects the various technologies to be battling it out in the smart metering space for some time, and says newer markets like China, India and the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf "could be potential growth centres of LoRa". He adds: "Every LPWAN technology has unique capabilities in terms data speed, range and connectivity. End-users adopt these technologies based on their requirements, so at least for the next five years they would co-exist. "But in the future, with the implementation of 5G networks, newer technologies capable of carrying a comparatively large amount of data coupled with better real-time access could disrupt existing LPWAN technologies. It could also be impacted by better battery technologies." Murray, who has also worked on metering for Veolia, Affinity Water and Homerider, thinks the UK water companies would be tempted by the new technologies if the price is right but says – outside the water-stressed areas – they are biding their time. Southern Water opted for AMR meters in its major metering programme "For water in the UK there's no mandate to meter, let alone smart meter, and this has driven the situation where there is no common standard for this smart metering technology, so you have competing protocols and radio technologies," he says. "The industry's in that kind of quagmire of: 'Is it Betamax or VHS?' Which do they back? They want something that's interoperable, they want something that's long-lasting – 15 years' life, similar to the life of a mechanical meter – and they want it future-proofed." Hudson says the decision to back any particular technology at this stage might be considered a risk but it depends on the long-term objectives of the water company in question, with leak detection, asset management and real-time usage notification all achievable using the currently available technologies. "The degree of change of technology in the IoT-metering space is high and therefore factors like cost, number of connections and integration play a vital role," he adds. It remains to be seen when the bulk of the UK water companies will be persuaded the time is right to adopt smart meters. Southern Water opted for automated meter reading (AMR) across its region between 2010 and 2015 when those devices – which can be read using drive-by technology – were the most advanced available but, even though there are now technologically superior options, it has reaped the benefits of that decision: with 88 per cent of its customer base now metered, there has been a 16 per cent reduction in water use. Murray is confident that universal metering remains a matter of when not if, and Wheatley is already speaking to water companies about its vision to see meter data used for machine learning, which could provide predictions that avert problems before they happen. "Meters used to be a cash register – it was a means of capturing consumption information every six months for a domestic property and sending a bill," he says. "They could be a far more valuable asset, collecting more frequent data and producing more insight in terms of data. What's recorded and measured can be far more than just water consumption – they could measure ambient temperature and pressure. Having that sort of information and granularity, they could use more AI and machine-learning technology to really predict what's going to happen, and that's going to take the water industry into a new area. It could change everything completely." GOAL 6 WATER CONSUMPTION