How can we achieve energy efficiency and resilience for an aging electrical infrastructure?
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With aging and often simple electrical infrastructure, there is a growing concern about how UK water companies can deal with two sides of the same coin, to maximise energy efficiency due to an explosion in energy costs and ensuring energy resilience.
This set against an ambitious net zero landscape goal and leveraging renewables. Electrical infrastructure is critical to the supply of clean water and the treatment of wastewater, in a recent years and explosion in energy costs, and new demands on our energy networks has meant, that energy consumption and resilience are the top of everyone’s agenda.
UK water companies consume circa 3% of the UK’s total energy, with 8.5% coming from renewables, the sector have set themselves some ambitious goals to achieve net zero by 2030. There is no silver bullet to the trilemma of resilience, efficiency, and de-carbonisation, but there are lessons that can be learned/ from other industries. Undoubtedly there needs to be large investment into electrical infrastructure, but it is possible to generate data from existing assets.
As well as ensuring for the new assets that are installed the same challenges of unknown longevity of the asset does not become a problem in 2040 and beyond. This daily dash will seek to map the often-unique challenges faced by water companies, such as brownouts and high energy consumption due to aged infrastructure.