Binnies and project partners shared their emerging findings from a project funded by the Water Breakthrough Challenge at a virtual water industry workshop on 20 April.
Binnies, in collaboration with South West Water, Castle Water, RWE and the University of the West of England, was awarded innovation funding through Ofwat’s Water Breakthrough Challenge. The challenge the team sought to solve was how to create flexible local water supply schemes to address water resilience issues and open competition from third-party suppliers into the English water distribution network. The team’s innovative submission used RWE’s multi-use abstraction licence, at one of the company’s power stations as a pilot, to develop a local, low carbon, scalable water treatment process.
Binnies was responsible for the project management of the feasibility study on behalf of all contributing partners and led the technical elements from a process mitigation, civil, mechanical, electrical, instrumentation design and environmental assessment point of view (risk, impact and benefit), as well as from a construction cost and programme perspective.
The process was selected to provide a modular design that used prefabricated process units to maximise off-site manufacture, minimise concrete construction and give the flexibility to scale up or down for other similar applications. Watch this animation for more details.
Using the RWE site as a test case enabled the project to challenge commercial and legal blockers through a series of concurrent project work packages aiming to:
- overcome regulatory and commercial barriers
- overcome network access constraints to open competition from third party suppliers
- develop the technical solution
- develop water quality standards and safety plans
- complete a scalability assessment of the process equipment by identifying potential existing licences that might be suitable for a local water treatment plant
- develop a new business model for investors.
This innovation project investigated ways to improve water management by using this private licenced water abstraction site alongside a local modular treatment plant to test whether multi-use licences would give the required flexibility between essential and non-essential uses, depending on levels of supply and demand.
Flexible Local Water Supply Schemes have the ability to support and complement the regional transfer schemes and encourage greater water efficiency. Work continues to explore the opportunities.