SWAN Corner: Scaling Smart Water — How Utilities Can Grow Quickly And Confidently With Digital Technologies
By Matt Rolls
Challenges associated with deploying smart water technologies include “Where do I begin?” and “Who do I use?”. These questions can often be barriers to small and mid-sized utilities that have limited resources available to them and are already burdened with competing daily priorities. The consequences of these pressures are far-reaching, with the potential to impact public health, environmental sustainability, economic stability, and the safety and well-being of their most valued assets — their staff. Navigating this complex landscape to ensure continued delivery of safe and reliable water and wastewater services requires utilities of all sizes to share a common vision to optimize operations through educating, equipping, engaging, and empowering their personnel to make more informed decisions through adoption of digital water technologies.
A prime example of the successful adoption and scaling of digital technologies is Mustang Special Utilities District (MSUD). Mustang is the largest special utility district in Texas, providing water and wastewater services to more than 120,000 residents via 42 lift stations, 7 pump stations, 24 well sites, and 2 wastewater treatment plants. Located north of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, Mustang covers one of the fastest-growing areas in the U.S., experiencing a 12.5% year-over-year population growth. This places enormous pressure on MSUD to be resilient and to make smart decisions quickly.
In 2012, MSUD began working with Specific Energy, a digital technology provider focused on intelligent pump system management, based out of Georgetown, TX. At that time MSUD only managed 8 lift stations, all of which were controlled by a complex variety of different control panel designs, instrumentation, and traditional radio-based SCADA systems. Commands to the lift stations were sent via two-way radio, resulting in multi-minute delays between command and operation; there was minimal remote oversight and control of lift station operations.
“Let's say we had an emergency at a lift station, and I had to turn the pump off, for some reason,” explains Aldo Zamora, Water Reclamations Manager at Mustang. “I would have to wait 6 to 10 minutes to find out whether it had damaged anything.” Operators needed to visit each lift station daily, including weekends, to check wet wells for debris, check that the level was below the high float, turn on pumps to check the amperage, and check for clogs caused by grease, oil, and debris. Operators would manually log everything in a book and drive to the next site to start again. One of the problems that required regular site visits was the pump ‘clogging’ effect of grease and oil left on the water, which resulted in expensive pump repairs and replacements for Mustang. “Once or twice a week, we would have to go out with our vacuum trucks and just pump out all the grease that was floating up on top of the water. The problem was that it [grease and floatables] was damaging to our pumps, and we’re using a lot of equipment — it was using up a lot of man hours,” explains Zamora.
To address these challenges, Specific Energy’s Lift Station Guardian (LSG) has been used by Mustang since 2012 to control its lift station operations, and the technology has advanced to support the growing needs of Mustang. The latest features include remote and automated maintenance options. “The focus is to save money, equipment, and ultimately save man hours,” adds Zamora.
Mustang wanted a solution that could let the utility see what was happening in real time to handle the grease, oil, and buildup, and that could also meet regulations. Initially, Specific Energy focused on two things: redundant control and providing insights into what was happening on site. Once these were up and running, a suite of remote maintenance controls was added, which can all be monitored via the LSG’s dashboard on a laptop or mobile device. These maintenance controls included Pump Snoring, Float Testing, and Force Main Scouring.
The number of lift stations Mustang operates has expanded from 8 to 42 since the partnership began and will continue to increase as growing populations put higher demand on Mustang’s system. These features have already reduced the overall maintenance costs by $570,000/year across the 42 lift stations. But an equally important reduction is the time staff spend in the field, which has reduced by 11%, with future projections suggesting a 30% reduction, leaving operators free to focus on continuing to improve the reliability of their system.
Mustang is not alone, either in relation to the challenges it faces or in its strategic scaling of digital technologies to support the modernization of its operations. Murfreesboro Water Resources Department (MWRD) in Tennessee serves approximately 105,000 customers across a distribution system that encompasses 36 square miles and 455 miles of piping. MWRD first started working with Specific Energy in 2019, applying their Dynamic Pump Optimizer (DPO) digital twin technology to optimize pumping systems at their water treatment plant. This delivered immediate benefits to MWRD, including reduced maintenance and downtime of their pump assets, and considerable reduction in energy consumption associated with their pumping operations (in excess of 40% in certain instances). Based on the success of those systems, they then scaled the technology to apply the analytics to improve water quality in the distribution system. Those efforts have reduced water age and disinfection byproducts throughout the system while improving residual concentrations at the farthest reaches of the distribution system. With the support of their trusted technology partners, MWRD have now integrated their pumping digital twins together with their hydraulic model and AMI data to create a holistic digital twin of the distribution system.
This has unlocked significant benefits for them, not only by providing operators full visibility of their entire water distribution system — encompassing both the water network and the treatment plant to enhance network operations like flushing — but also by enabling identification of deviations between actual and modeled data, which allows MWRD and their engineers to continually improve the accuracy of the hydraulic model and its outputs.
As within any industry, the successful implementation of new technologies and data-driven strategies hinges upon multiple facets; putting the tools in the hands of the workforce is only the first step. It is critical then to empower those that are going to be using the technology with the necessary training, skills, and support so that they can extract the maximum value from the technology, both for themselves and for the utility. Therefore, tailored training programs are critical for operators, engineers, and managers to ensure they can effectively utilize new digital systems.
This is where innovation in the business models used to deliver digital technologies to utilities can be better aligned. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), or subscription model, is becoming increasingly prevalent across the industry for this reason. No longer do regulated utilities have to fund these projects with large, upfront capital expenditures, which has historically led to a risk-averse approach to innovation adoption and the subsequent stagnation to progress. Instead, utilities can now ‘pay-as-they-play’, which not only frees them up to be more open and creative with digital projects but also ensures that the technology provider has more skin in the game to work in partnership with the utility as opposed to the traditional vendor and buyer relationship. This also incentivizes the technology provider to ensure they provide the requisite training and ongoing support across the utility, which serves to support an empowered, inclusive, and collaborative culture amongst users, aligned across common goals that can accelerate the breaking down of traditional departmental silos and barriers to successful technology adoption.
In conclusion, while each water and wastewater utility are unique, many of the challenges they face are common, and therefore the path forward for utilities of all sizes must include embracing of digital technologies to modernize their operations. Perhaps most critically, an open and collaborative partnership with the technology provider(s) has proven to demonstrate a path where utilities have successfully worked through the challenges of data quality and security to realize value through improving operations, reducing energy consumption, and educating, equipping, engaging, and empowering their personnel. Through such openness, collaboration, and agility, water utilities can address current and assess future challenges to ensure a sustainable and resilient service for their customers.
Matt Rolls, Vice President of Business Development, EMEA at Specific Energy, has over 30 years’ experience in the water and wastewater industry, covering a variety of commercial and leadership roles across global organizations such as Suez, Black & Veatch, Bluewater Bio, and Evoqua Water Technologies. At Specific Energy, Matt is responsible for strategy and growth of the business across EMEA and other international markets through developing and maintaining customer and partner relationships and demonstrating the advantages Specific Energy can bring to pump system design, operation, and asset management programs for operational resilience and energy efficiency.
SWAN, the Smart Water Networks Forum (SWAN), is the leading global hub for the smart water sector. A UK-based non-profit, SWAN brings together leading international water utilities, solution providers, academics, investors, regulators, and other industry experts to accelerate the awareness and adoption of “smart,” data-driven solutions in water and wastewater networks worldwide. Learn more at www.swan-forum.com.