Southern Water demonstrates the positive PR value of remote monitoring of its distributed assets

In a piece in the Times on 18 January, under the headline ‘Southern Water taps into smart tech to stop leaks’, Katie Prescott noted that:

“Southern Water has introduced artificial intelligence to its sewage system to cut hundreds of leaks caused by so-called fatbergs and other blockages. In a £15 million project, the company has put 22,000 digital monitors along the 24,500 miles of its sewer network. These alert its control centre to unusual flows or anomalies by measuring the height of wastewater under manholes. After heavy rain, the technology can help show when flooding of properties, roads and infrastructure is likely to occur.”

Southern Water’s press release would have us believe that it is the industry leading water company in the use of remote monitoring of a network of pipeline assets. In fact, the software enabling the monitoring comes from StormHarvester Ltd., a company which originated in Queensland, Australia a decade ago. For the past five years its monitoring software has been in production use in several of the UK water companies.

“Our systems accurately anticipate runoff volumes using hyperlocal rainfall forecasts combined with our machine learning technology. This ability to “look into the future” allows us to anticipate future asset behaviour and therefore optimise its performance – retain water, release water, turn off pumps, turn on aerators, etc.”

StormHarvester Ltd

Setting aside Southern Water’s PR-focussed adoption of the terms ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘ revolutionary technology’ for what is simply a remote site monitoring solution, the numbers associated with this roll-out might raise the following question:

If Southern Water can deploy subcontractors to fit float switches to its network of 22,000 manholes at an average cost of £700 apiece, then surely the cost of remotely monitoring, measuring and reporting the real-time volume of discharge from all of the Solent’s 300+ combined sewer outflows can’t be that great? The technology exists, the sub-contractor network is clearly available, so why did the UK Government reject such a solution as ‘limited by technical feasibility and cost” in its response to the Environmental Audit Committee in 2022?

Could it be that the water companies collectively decided that disclosure of the actual scale of the CSO problem would have been a little less PR friendly?