Innovation in the water industry involves cooperation, collaboration and ambitious goals to push the envelope of what is achievable. Innovation is a key pillar for our goals during AMP7, and this will continue as we progress into the 2025-2030 cycle going forward.
The challenges facing the sector are well known and have only increased with higher media scrutiny. In particular, there has been greater focus on pollution to the natural environment, leakage and water quality issues at customer taps. Performance standards for all targets will only increase in 2025 to 2030 as there will be higher expectations from regulators and customers, and innovation could provide a springboard for achieving these challenging targets. Innovation will provide good opportunities to bring internal colleagues across the business, and external staff across the sector to work towards a common goal.
At South East Water our innovation strategy is continuously updated so that it is bespoke and suited to our needs. There is a heavy emphasis on internal and external collaboration to push the boundaries of innovation. We have integrated collaboration mechanisms such as the Ofwat Innovation Fund and Spring, which will allow us to work closely with other water companies to tackle the challenges we face as a sector. These schemes also offer beneficial communication avenues to share best practice.
The Ofwat Innovation Fund is a mechanism provided by the regulator, allowing partner agreements between water and other companies, to tackle the biggest challenges facing the sector.
The fund was founded in 2020 to encourage collaborative innovation across the water sector, allowing partnerships with non-water sector companies with relevant expertise in key areas. Since its inception, 94 initiatives have been funded to a value of £140 million, 17 of these awarded in the most recent round of applications. As a water-only company this demonstrates our commitment to innovation and shows our willingness to strengthen and grow.
Some of the schemes that we are working on through the Ofwat fund include:
- ‘Supporting customers in vulnerable circumstances’ is a project which uses behavioural science to apply ethnographic principles, to understand who the water sector’s consumers really are. The project aims to understand consumer engagement needs and intends to re-engage consumers as trusted sources of information for the sector. The project is led by Severn Trent Water in partnership with CCW, ourselves, Thames Water, and United Utilities. Now complete, we are working on implementing the project outcomes to our benefit within the company.
- CatchmentLIFE’, our lead project. Working with the River Restoration Centre (RRC), CatchmentLIFE aims to build bespoke software that volunteers and experts can use, showing the impacts of habitat degradation on wildlife and ecological communities. Awarded during the second iteration of the fund, we are due to complete the project in early 2025.
- ‘Water Net Gain’ is a catchment-scale approach whereby farmers are paid to store water on their land. Restoring natural sponges, like healthy soils, woodlands and wetlands, can passively contribute water to summer base flows, but the creation of additional smart ponds and lakes, can be used for farm demand management or active releasing flows during droughts. Investigating this could go some way to improving water resilience during periods of drought, which are only likely to become more prevalent over time, as well as many other benefits such as flood protection, biodiversity improvements and reducing demand for potable water through rainwater and effluent harvesting.
- ‘National Leakage Research & Test Centre (NLRTC)’ will be a 5km buried water pipe network specifically for developing and testing inventions without disrupting customers’ supplies or affecting water quality. The advantage of this will be that new technologies are more likely to be fast-tracked and thus allowing the water sector to rapidly adapt new technologies for practical use.
- ‘Catchment Systems Thinking Cooperative (CaSTCo)’ is a partnership led by United Utilities between the Rivers Trust, 12 water and sewerage companies including ourselves, as well as academia and environmental charities – it has been awarded £7.1 million to revolutionise the way crucial data about England and Wales’ water environments are gathered and shared, in particular on the health of the nation’s rivers.
Further details of the various funds can be found on the Ofwat Innovation in Water Challenge website.
Existing innovations not yet implemented may hold the key to further improvements. We are always looking to improve to provide the best possible service to our customers.
Ofwat has also launched a new scheme, the Water Efficiency Fund, which will kickstart during the 2025 to 2030 period. This fund will allow water companies to bid for up to £100 million that will develop transformative innovations that will reduce demand across England and Wales.
This scheme was developed in recognition of the specific challenges related to reducing demand across water networks, which can at times be difficult to develop. We must bring customers along with us on this journey as water companies alone cannot do this, there encouraging wider collaboration will be key for our successes in the future.
We are extremely excited to take part in the numerous opportunities that will be available with the schemes launch in early 2025.
We are always looking to improve to provide the best possible service to our customers.
We are utilising external expertise to share knowledge on proven technologies which may be useful for the challenges we have identified.
In preparation for the 2025 to 2030 period (and in the final year of our 2020 to 2025 period), we have identified 14 areas of focus for the next few years, ranging from net zero goals, to improved asset health monitoring and nature-based solutions.
This approach enables us to target appropriate technologies, scoping out short trials which may either ‘fail-fast’ or succeed against initially agreed objectives, before expanding to a wider rollout programme should the innovation prove successful and useful. This year we have pursued an asset health trial which was extremely successful in demonstrating the potential energy saving, resilience, and maintenance improvements and we will be looking to develop this further in the future.
In addition, we utilise other avenues for innovation, including but not limited to, Spring Centre of Excellence, UKWIR and ISLE technologies, which provide us with further solutions which could be of interest.
Innovation at the heart of our present and our future
Innovation is at the heart of how we seek to deliver great customer service as well as continually looking to improve our operations to deliver great outcomes for our customers. With this in mind, we are exploring further ways to increase collaboration across the water sector and engage with our local communities to listen and deliver the service that our customers expect. These ideas will be built into the heart of our planning for the future, whether that’s through the 25 Year Environment Plan, our PR 24 Business Plan, or elsewhere.