2.4 The Opportunities and Barriers for the Smart
Wastewater Network
By putting intelligence into the wastewater network, there are a large amount of
benefits. These include an improvement in environmental water quality and
balancing network improvements to counteract the ever-tightening consents at the
WTW. Consent conditions are reaching the point where the level of treatment
required to comply with environmental permits are intensive enough to have both
a large negative impact on the air environment through increased energy consumption and having an impact on resource issues through larger quantities of chemical
consumption to treat to lower and more exacting levels. By providing better control
of the impact, there is potential for providing a greater level of pollution control for a
lesser overall environmental and financial impact.
However there are technological and financial barriers to the implementation of
smart wastewater networks including:
• The development of wastewater network models for the purpose of operational
control rather than engineering design, which is where most of the wastewater
network models currently fit.
• Knowledge of the financial and environmental benefits of better monitoring and
control in the wastewater network. There is a perceived benefit of getting a better
environmental performance overall and being able to balance this with a potential
loosening of environmental permits at the treatment works but as yet this is
unproven.
• Integration and performance of meteorological artificial intelligence to feed into
an operational model of a smart wastewater network. Enabling a measure of the
impact of potential of storms on the network.
• The proliferation of measurement in the wastewater network, where the barrier at
the current time is both technological and financial on the installation front, quite
aside from the costs of maintenance of the instrumentation in terms of risk to
operating staff and also the cost of conducting it.
• The methodology of the integration and interaction between the wastewater
collection network and the WTW is largely unproven at the present time.
These issues need to be resolved before smart wastewater networks can proliferate throughout the wastewater treatment system as a whole, and there is a potential
for them only to be installed on the larger, higher value networks where large
populations are served, before the technology proliferates into the smaller networks
systems.
Monitoring and Controlling a Smarter Wastewater Treatment System: A UK. . .
125
Wastewater Network
By putting intelligence into the wastewater network, there are a large amount of
benefits. These include an improvement in environmental water quality and
balancing network improvements to counteract the ever-tightening consents at the
WTW. Consent conditions are reaching the point where the level of treatment
required to comply with environmental permits are intensive enough to have both
a large negative impact on the air environment through increased energy consumption and having an impact on resource issues through larger quantities of chemical
consumption to treat to lower and more exacting levels. By providing better control
of the impact, there is potential for providing a greater level of pollution control for a
lesser overall environmental and financial impact.
However there are technological and financial barriers to the implementation of
smart wastewater networks including:
• The development of wastewater network models for the purpose of operational
control rather than engineering design, which is where most of the wastewater
network models currently fit.
• Knowledge of the financial and environmental benefits of better monitoring and
control in the wastewater network. There is a perceived benefit of getting a better
environmental performance overall and being able to balance this with a potential
loosening of environmental permits at the treatment works but as yet this is
unproven.
• Integration and performance of meteorological artificial intelligence to feed into
an operational model of a smart wastewater network. Enabling a measure of the
impact of potential of storms on the network.
• The proliferation of measurement in the wastewater network, where the barrier at
the current time is both technological and financial on the installation front, quite
aside from the costs of maintenance of the instrumentation in terms of risk to
operating staff and also the cost of conducting it.
• The methodology of the integration and interaction between the wastewater
collection network and the WTW is largely unproven at the present time.
These issues need to be resolved before smart wastewater networks can proliferate throughout the wastewater treatment system as a whole, and there is a potential
for them only to be installed on the larger, higher value networks where large
populations are served, before the technology proliferates into the smaller networks
systems.
Monitoring and Controlling a Smarter Wastewater Treatment System: A UK. . .
125