Just as important as maintaining our pipeline network, is maintaining our water treatment assets.
We report both unexpected asset failures as well as those when a site is out of operation due to planned maintenance and improvement work. This incentive helps us understand the overall health and reliability of our assets.
Our target for unplanned outage reduces each year and our target for 2024/5 was to keep outages lower than 2.3 per cent of our total water production capacity. This target decreased each year in this five-year period to make sure we continue to improve our performance.
Unlike many other measures we report against, the lower the score the better.
How have we performed?
Over the reporting year 2024/25 our unplanned outage level was 2.1 per cent, outperforming our target.
This good level of performance was due to our maintenance strategy which helps prevent issues before they arise, while also ensuring we react quickly if unexpected failures do occur.
We did see an increase in production outage related to water quality changes impacting the operation of some water treatment works, which is currently excluded from the reporting category but will be included from next year. We have a number of schemes which will help reduce the impact of changes in raw water quality including new treatment plants and catchment management strategies to reduce the impact of nitrates and turbidity we are seeing in our raw water sources.
