28 JUN, 2024

BY GAVIN PEARSON

The use of technology including digital twins is set to play a “massive role” in delivering the ambitious £96bn of investment in the water sector’s eighth asset management period (AMP8) between 2025 and 2030, according to Severn Trent’s digital engineering lead.

Speaking to NCE at its Water conference on 20 June, Severn Trent Water business lead for digital engineering, sustainability and emerging tech Nitesh Alagh, said that the industry had been aware of the challenge of delivering AMP8 and had started preparing ahead of time.

“I think what’s interesting here is that we’ve already figured out that there is going to be a bigger investment and we've already started preparing ourselves,” Alagh said. “In fact, most water companies are exiting AMP7 at the run rate that they need to be at in year one of AMP8.”

While initial determination and final determination of the water companies’ plans is yet to be handed down by regulator Ofwat, Alagh said there has already “been a lot of enabling activity”.

“We all know that we’ve got our work cut out,” he continued. “So, I’m sure I’m speaking on behalf of my peers in the water industry when we say that we have already started on AMP8.”

This is something that was echoed on stage at the event by directors from Northumbrian Water and Affinity Water, as well as Severn Trent.

This will be vital because the near-doubling of capital spending - from £51bn in AMP7 to the £96bn for AMP8 - and the move to build new reservoirs for the first time in decades will put a strain on delivery capacity.

Many speakers at the NCE Water conference spoke about the way delivery would therefore have to change, with industry looking to new practices and technologies to ensure good value and quality.

Alagh agrees that this will now be central to success.

“Technology is going to play a massive role,” he said. “If we are going to achieve the outcomes that we are committed to delivering, we’re going to have to do things differently. And one of the key enablers is going to be digitalisation, is going to be technology itself, to make us go faster, to make us go cheaper, but not compromise on quality, not compromise on risk.”

Alagh also sees this increased capital investment as an opportunity to embrace digital twins.

“The idea of digital twins is going to be a massive enabler within the capital infrastructure itself,” he said.

“Whilst the concept of digital twin is not limited to capital investments, it is a fantastic place to make real headway in our digital twin journeys, to be able to rehearse how we’re going to deliver on our construction sites, to be able to do handovers digitally, and then to hand over not just a physical asset to our colleagues in operations, but also a digital asset which they can operate with a lot more confidence and with a lot more efficiency.”

None of this eliminates one of the biggest challenges – complexity. With so many different companies and specialisms involved, Alagh wants to see this addressed from the very top, with greater collaboration across water companies themselves.

“I think ‘collaboration’ is a word that’s been mentioned so many times, but we've got to truly bring it to life,” he said. “I think as client organisations, we have got a huge responsibility to collaborate with other client organisations to try and achieve standardisations and then really go back to our supply chain and our customers with a consistent message so that they’re not constantly having to shift as supply chain organisations to serve specific needs of different clients within the same industry, within the same sector.”