Smart Water Project of the Year
DC Water event management system, USA
What is it?
DC Water provides water and wastewater services to more than 700,000 residents and 21.3 million annual visitors with a total service area of 725 square miles. In 2021, DC Water began working together with Layermark to develop an event management system (EMS) which acts as an early warning system for non-routine events, which was completed in February 2022. The EMS includes real-time Flood Track and Water Track dashboards as well as an Incident Tracking Tool and Resource Management Tool.
What has it done?
The project enabled DC Water to move from a siloed response approach to an integrated model which provides real-time situational awareness across all areas of the business required to respond to an emergency; supporting its transformation into a data-driven enterprise. As result of this, DC Water can provide a faster response and reduce the overall impact of flooding, water system emergencies and similar events in the city.
What makes it special?
This project is a shining example of utility climate resilience at its best. In response to the increasing frequency of extreme weather events and the challenge of ageing infrastructure, DC Water has taken a leading proactive approach that enables it to actually utilise all its available data to more quickly pinpoint problems, generate automatic alerts, optimise event response, minimise customer impacts and reduce recovery times.
One of the biggest barriers to progression that utilities worldwide face is the reliance on siloed management platforms which prevent effective integration and utilisation of data. In under six months, DC Water has transformed its operations, placing emphasis on an effective, easy-to-use dashboard that provides everyone access to real-time data and performance monitoring.
The EMS exemplifies the future of efficient, effective district collaboration, enabling incident reporting in real-time to be viewed not just by DC Water employees but also third-party stakeholders, including the emergency response group for the district of Columbia and City government officials.
Distinction
Evides pumping optimisation, Netherlands
What is it?
Evides NV provides water service to 2.5 million customers in the south-western region of the Netherlands. In 2020 into 2021, it worked with Bentley Systems to develop a digital twin of the water supply network to optimise pumping and ultimately reduce carbon footprint.
What has it done?
In this project, Bentley’s hydraulic modelling technology was coupled with an optimisation algorithm to estimate dynamic pump switch points based on optimum efficiency for major pumping stations. Through evaluating the dynamic switch points using Bentley’s decision support tool, WaterGEMS, and performing energy cost calculations, optimum efficiency was determined for all major pumping stations (totalling over 100 million m3 pumped per year).
What makes it special?
As result of this project, the pumping stations now use 33% less energy resulting in a carbon reduction of 942,000 kilograms per year. This equates to energy cost savings of approximately €300,000 annually.
At a time when the world is focussing on reducing carbon footprint, this project places Evides right at the very heart of utility progress and will help it to achieve its aim to become carbon neutral by 2025.
The majority of utilities worldwide are reluctant to adopt a cloud environment for hydraulic modelling and still rely on disconnected, disparate siloed models. In fully embracing the benefits of using the cloud and integrating all relevant data sets onto a single platform, this project epitomises the direction that utilities need to go in order to achieve the greatest benefits.