Beyond The Buzzword: How Utility Operators Can Use Big Data For Better Asset Management, Operations, And Customer Engagement

Big Data is more than a marketing buzzword. It’s become an essential tool for helping utility operators prioritize capital investments, manage network assets, and provide a higher level of service to customers.

The term “Big Data” is everywhere lately, from industries like healthcare, IT, and finance to water and wastewater. Data collection itself, of course, is nothing new for utilities. The vast majority of water and wastewater utilities in the United States are automated within their treatment plants, and utility operators have long used data to optimize plant operations, water quality, and energy consumption. So how is Big Data different, and why should utility operators care?

The Industrial Internet of Things

Big Data refers to the massive amounts of data and information generated and collected in the digital age, the inability to process that data through traditional means, and the potential to apply that data for solving critical business and industry challenges.

The rise of Big Data has been accelerated by the rapid adoption of all sorts of wireless communication devices, sensors, and remote data collection systems as these solutions have become more readily available and their costs have steadily come down. Along with greater accessibility and lower costs has come a considerable global investment in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), a system of physical devices with the ability to collect, share, and exchange data across wireless networks. The research firm Gartner, Inc. estimates that there were 8.4 billion connected devices in use worldwide in 2017, with a projected 20.4 billion by 2020 (Source: Gartner).

In the water and wastewater industry, the growing number of remotely connected sensors and devices in the field has meant a huge increase in the type and amount of data available to utility and plant operators. Water utilities making the switch from standard meters to smart metering, for example, have seen an enormous increase in the amount of information coming from their meters. Instead of a once-a-month reading, utilities now have continuous, wireless feeds from every meter on the network, sending data back from the point of delivery, and giving operators a near real-time view into conditions outside the plant.

With this increase in information comes a new challenge: What do utilities and plant operators do with all this data once they have it?

Systems that collect, report, and make sense of Big Data provide the answer to this question and offer significant benefits for utilities and their customers. Real-time data collection can help water utilities respond to small leaks, significantly reduce non-revenue water (NRW) losses, prevent major pipe bursts, avoid service disruptions, and better engage their customers around issues related to water use and conservation. For wastewater treatment plants, data from combined and sanitary sewer overflow (CSO/SSO) monitoring systems can be used to alert operators of wet-weather conditions, prevent overflows, and avoid regulatory penalties and fines.

Eliminating Blind Spots and Finding the Needle in a Growing Haystack
While utilities have begun to deploy smart meters at the point of delivery (or, in the case of wastewater utilities, sensors at critical points their collection systems), most utilities in the United States still lack visibility across their distribution and collection networks that sit between their treatment plants and the properties and customers they serve. IIoT solutions give utilities a new way to eliminate those blind spots by making wireless remote monitoring more accessible, more affordable, and easier for utilities to deploy. Wireless remote monitoring and data collection can give utility operators critical insight into what’s going on underground, from pipe leaks, breaks, and pressure transients on the water distribution side to CSOs and SSOs due to blockages and wet-weather events on the wastewater treatment and collection side.

The continuous data collected and transmitted by these sensors presents utilities with a large and growing amount of data. Their new challenge is not only to manage and secure the data in these systems, but also to make sense of it — to find the needle in the growing haystack of information and use it to improve operations. This requires software with analytical tools that can manage the Big Data, and more importantly, provide analytics and tools that deliver actionable information to utilities so they aren’t buried under volumes of data.

Examples of these types of solutions are becoming common across the water and wastewater industry. For example, one utility deployed wireless pressure recorders in a small part of the water distribution network where the utility was concerned about leaks and breaks. Within a few days of installation, the recorders alerted the utility to a quick pressure drop in a particular area. A crew was sent out to investigate but failed to detect a leak through their visual inspection and reported “no leak found.” Within 48 hours, the same wireless pressure recorders detected a sudden and much larger drop in pressure, which turned out to be a major pipe burst. Customers began calling to report water in the streets. In this instance, the wireless pressure recorders had collected data continuously, providing a key alert when — and only when—there was an issue the utility needed to be aware of and its location. The system’s automated alerts preceded customer reports of a leak, providing a perfect example of how the IIoT, Big Data, and analytics could have helped this utility catch and repair the leak while it was still small, preventing the major pipe burst and the associated additional damage, water loss, repair costs, and liabilities.

Wireless pressure sensors can also be used to capture water hammer, or pressure transient, events that lead to weakening of pipes and infrastructure. With these, Big Data gets even bigger, with some pressure sensors analyzing 30 to 100+ pieces of information per second during a water hammer event, tracking rapid spikes and drops in pressure that can damage water infrastructure.

In the absence of monitoring equipment and associated Big Data, utilities are often left to rely on visual observations or react to customer complaints, with no insight into the cause or location of the problem. By instead using Big Data to identify current or potential trouble spots in the water or wastewater network, utilities are able to save money on maintenance, repairs, and avoided property damage, improve environmental and regulatory compliance, and better use the dollars allocated for infrastructure investment by addressing areas of highest risk based on actual criticality, not just system age. 

Improving Customer Service

Today’s consumers are environmentally aware and increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of residential, commercial, and industrial water use, the effects of climate change on water supplies, and the frequency and severity of extreme weather events and associated impacts of harmful wastewater discharges back into the environment. Consumers expect their public water and wastewater utilities to be responsible and resilient in the face of incidents such as flooding, drought, or water shortages, and responsive and communicative about planned maintenance, public health concerns, water-use restrictions, and other service-related issues. As utilities raise water and sewer rates to fund deferred infrastructure investments, consumers have a correspondingly higher expectation of the level of customer service provided.

To help utilities meet these expectations, wireless remote monitoring solutions for water distribution and wastewater collection systems continuously gather and analyze Big Data, giving operators the ability to be proactive and prescriptive instead of reactive about operating their utilities to provide the highest quality of service to their customers.

Big Data is here to stay, and the ability to manage and interpret growing volumes of data is an essential skill for modern utilities and their operators. The good news is that the tools, software, and analytics exist today to make it easier to continuously find the important needles in the growing haystacks of information, allowing utilities to provide more sustainable and resilient infrastructure, improve operations and environmental compliance, reduce costs, and improve customer service. Big Data … big results.