Bob Taylor. Chief Executive Officer of Portsmouth Water discusses the strategic issues for leakage management ahead of the 10th Global Leakage Summit taking place in London next month, which he will be chairing.

The water company has recently committed as a business to further reduce its leakage levels by 20% over the next 5 years and is active in harnessing the latest technology.

The 2019 Summit will be the fourth you have chaired since 2015 – during those Summits you will have seen a range of agendas, all addressing the ‘hot topics’ and leakage issues of the day. But have you observed any significant differences, or changes in emphasis, in the agenda topics over the years? And have the attitudes of water industry practitioners to dealing with leakage changed?

Bob Taylor :-"I have maintained an active interest in leakage management since my early days in the industry and the focus on leakage management today has never been greater.

From a global perspective the concerns about water scarcity in the face of climate change, urbanisation and population growth have been growing steadily stronger – illustrated clearly by the fact that water crises have featured in the World Economic Forum’s top 5 global risks (in terms of impact) for each of the last 5 years as a societal risk.

In response, it is clear that governments and regulators are starting to understand more clearly the role that good leakage management can play in meeting these challenges and water operations managers globally are under pressure to take action.

From a technological perspective, it is clear that knowledge of the techniques available to leakage practitioners is becoming globalised and truly inspirational success stories are emerging from all over the world. And the impact of technology, particularly in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics is set to propel leakage management capability to a new level.

You will be chairing two very timely and relevant panel sessions on Day 1 of the conference. They deal with the specific challenges, regulatory, political and economic, as well as operational challenges, facing the UK and European water industry at the moment. What questions would you like to see addressed by the senior water company practitioners leading the presentations?

Leakage management certainly in the UK is moving away from an economic balance between leakage reduction effort and water saved to becoming a moral, societal and environmental necessity – and as leakage levels reduce the cost of every unit saved typically increases. Therefore the pressure for technology and innovation to deliver increasingly cost effective leakage reduction strategies has never been greater and amongst all of the emerging options and technologies we need to identify those that work most effciently to keep continuous downward pressure on the costs of leakage reduction.

Several sessions during the day address zero leakage, and the question of it ever becoming a reality. In the light of how water networks are configured, are advances in innovative technologies – to manage incoming data - sufficient to reduce leakage to anywhere near zero? Or do we need to look at the networks themselves?

There is no question as to whether zero leakage is achievable – in some parts of the world water companies are already close to this. The question is whether it can be sustainably achievable at costs which our customers are willing to bear; there is no doubt that we need to accelerate the pace of innovation and technological development to deliver the leakage improvements, particularly in older legacy networks, at reasonable cost.

This means that we need to focus not only on the traditional areas of detection and repair but look more widely at the way we design, install and operate our networks. Even today, with the huge emphasis globally on leakage management, we often take a short sighted approach to network design and our target should be to be able to design, build and operate networks that are leak free for their entire lives.

What are you most looking forward to at the 10th Global Leakage Summit in June?

It is always a great inspiration to learn about the success stories from companies around the world. The fact that leakage practitioners travel huge distances to share their experiences at this annual event bears testimony to the spirit of collaboration and knowledge sharing which is very prevalent in our industry. I am looking forward to hearing more success stories,learning about new and emerging technologies and meeting old and new friends from across the sector.

Anything else to add?

I would encourage all participants to engage with the debates and discussions – the challenges we face in our industry today are largely global in nature and the greater the diversity in the views and experiences we share, the more useful the sessions will be to us all.

Click here to view the full conference agenda

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