Presentations

View the Derceto powerpoint presentation. This is the same PowerPoint used at presentations by the US VP of Sales and the Chief Technical Officer. It's 10 MB in size, so please be patient.

Paper given by Laurie Reynolds of Mouchel at Computing & Control in the Water Industry.  It covers some of the fundamentals on energy use and energy optimisation for water distribution systems. 

ABSTRACT: Optimisation of water supply systems has been the subject of many papers over the past 20 years of CCWI conferences. Most papers have proposed various methods for off-line optimisation of complex networks to take advantage of low-priced energy tariffs, whereby the cost saving is achieved by rescheduling as much of the pumping load as possible to occur at night when the energy tariff is lowest. Whilst cost saving through time-of-use scheduling is an attractive opportunity for water companies, it does not save actual energy, it simply redistributes its use; consequently, there is no saving in carbon emissions. The only way the system can be operated more efficiently and hence save carbon as well as energy cost, is if the pumps themselves can be operated more efficiently.

The paper presents results following implementation of a closed-loop, real-time optimiser to four actual water supply systems in US. The data shows that by measuring the efficiency of each pump in real-time and ensuring that each pump in the system is positioned as close as possible to its best-efficiency point, significant improvements in average efficiency of between 6–9% can be made in addition to the 10% time of use savings. This in turn translates into real reductions of the carbon footprint.

Tom Nevins (Black & Veatch) and Chuck Weber (Water District No.1 of Johnson County, KS (WaterOne)) presented a paper at the 2009 AWWA DSS on water storage management. This took into account emergency reserves, fire fighting reserves and equalization volumes to determine safe operating levels.  The paper showed that distributing water around the various storage sites kept risk low as long as total water stored was sufficient to meet the emergency and fire reserve requirements. This project was commissioned by WaterOne to ensure that their Aquadapt implementation was given safe operating constraints on storage without unduly impacting on their ability to save on energy costs.