Delivering sustainable water systems by optimising existing infrastructure via improved knowledge, understanding and technology - project NEPTUNE

Water service providers (WSPs) have obligations to supply drinking water to all consumers that meets increasingly stringent water quality regulations and minimum flow and pressure criteria. At the same time, WSPs are required to be ever more efficient to demonstrate value, moves to sustainable operation and also to be more profitable (even where the supplies are publicly provided). Worldwide, not only in the UK, suppliers of water increasingly have to meet a widening range of performance criteria that are expected to improve year-on-year. Other pressures include the growing costs and availability of energy needed to deliver water, especially through pumping, the increasing uncertainty caused by climate change and the drive to minimise water losses from supply networks. Traditionally the supply of water via networks, to the tap, has been provided by large scale engineering and low-risk, low-technology systems. These rely heavily on energy use for pumping etc. and often operate inefficiently, with more pumping than is needed and excessive pressures in networks, leading to higher than necessary levels of leakage. NEPTUNE intends, by advancing knowledge and understanding and introducing new IT and technological systems, to provide the means whereby water service providers in the UK (and elsewhere, where the systems are similar), can better integrate the operation of their supply systems, to more efficiently manage security at the tap, minimise leakage and the redundant and unnecessary transfer of water or storage, hence saving resources, especially costs and energy.