HUBER UK’s Engineering & Operations Director Dave Thompson takes a look at what innovation can mean in practice in the water sector – and says it’s sometimes equally innovative to apply, reconfigure and adapt existing technologies to tackle new problems and challenges.

Dave Thompson: Nowadays innovation is of course widely discussed and pursued across the wider water sector – evidenced by the big multi-million-pound innovation competitions and funding awards.

One of the areas which is sometimes overlooked in all this is thinking about how to use tried and tested technologies in new ways to tackle new problems and challenges.

At HUBER, one of the ways we do this is by ensuring as far as possible that we are aligning our organisational capability across a range of fronts. So, we are constantly assessing what is happening in the marketplace and what’s coming down the line, alongside looking at what our customer requirements are and how best we can help to meet them.

We have several multi-disciplinary business development groups in place which means we’re able to bring a lot of expertise together from different disciplines in a systematic way to look at a range of issues. This includes informed input from colleagues across the business both in the UK and beyond – from colleagues with a sales background with invaluable market-based intelligence, to product and process engineers, people with applications experience, and our product managers in HUBER’s HQ in Germany.

Innovative blend of solutions to tackle stormwater discharges in AMP8

To take just a couple of examples – firstly, CSO screens. Since 1995 to date, we have supplied over 1400 CSO screens to water companies across the UK. In practical terms, the continuing high profile which stormwater discharges now occupy in the media means we are seeing a massive resurgence of interest in an established technology.

So, we have a breadth of established knowledge in this field – but the reality is that we have to roll that out again to people who have never previously been involved in the problems and challenges our CSO screens have been designed to address.

It goes without saying that this is going to be a major and ongoing issue during AMP8 and beyond. It’s also a problem which will probably need to be resolved via an innovative blend of solutions which includes CSO screens, increased stormwater storage and expanded treatment works capacity.

Two other areas where HUBER has some innovative solutions to offer which are rooted in existing technologies include our containerised S-DISC sludge thickening treatment solution and our ThermWin system which uses wastewater heat from sewer networks to generate energy to use for heating and cooling purposes in the built environment.

Innovative solutions rooted in existing technologies include containerised sludge thickening treatment and heat recovery from wastewater 

For example, our DfMA containerised sludge thickener unit which comprises of everything necessary to provide a cost effective, small footprint, plug and play sludge thickening plant. Developed during the pandemic, this is a solution that evolved during lockdown when everything stopped for a while.

We took our existing technology and packaged it in such a way that we ultimately ended up with an innovative product. We did all the conceptual design work working remotely. We created some momentum in a period where we had the luxury of time capacity. Having the space to pool our knowledge and experience enabled us to come up with a new solution which we think answers a number of challenges and problems our customers are dealing with.

Likewise, the development of our heat recovery technology which is primarily being driven by action on climate change. HUBER specialists explored the technical possibilities of how to use the significant heat potential which is always present in any sewer network and came up with our innovative HUBER ThermWin heat exchange system. Already in use outside the UK as a source of energy generation for cooling and heating purposes in a number of sectors, including hospitals, apartment blocks, offices and public buildings, we have yet to see a corresponding level of uptake here in the UK.

Structure of UK water sector - a potential barrier to innovation?

Which brings me to a question which has occurred to me in the course of my career about whether the way the UK water sector is actually structured can itself sometimes almost act as a barrier to innovation.

We basically have large regional monopolies in water companies focussed on a very specific area of critical infrastructure which in theory is supposed to yield efficiencies - as opposed to small municipalities in Germany.

One of the things that has struck me over the years in Germany is that the municipality in a local area has overall responsibility for roads, council buildings, wastewater treatment plant and so on. This means that in practice they can look at all of these separate areas in a holistic way and say, “We can recover the heat from the sewer network and use it to heat and cool our municipal buildings.”

In contrast, in the UK the water industry has limited options which primarily relate to whether regulated assets can be used in a non-regulated way to maximise the potential benefits to be gained from pursuing this type of approach.

As a result, it can sometimes appear that the water companies in England and Wales have limited agility when it comes to looking for business opportunities outside their highly regulated environment.

As it stands, the likelihood of a water company talking to a local authority in its operational area to say “we’ve got waste heat in our sewer and you’ve got buildings you need to heat in winter and cool down in summer - so let’s collaborate” doesn’t seem to be on the cards any time soon.

For us as a supplier it’s not really technological barriers that are inhibiting uptake and preventing broader, more holistic collaboration, it is more regulatory and organisational barriers that are acting as constraints.

As part of the innovation mindset, perhaps some more joined up thinking is needed between regulators, water companies, other critical infrastructure and built environment providers and the wider community to make that work.

In my view, innovative thinking by us as a supplier to understand the overall problem and where our technology fits into the development of a holistic solution is key to how we work with our clients. I’m sure that also applies to other organisations at different points of the supply chain.

I cannot over-emphasise the benefits of working collaboratively, which in my experience has often resulted in the development and implementation of genuinely innovative solutions. Looking to the massive investment the water sector now needs to deliver during AMP8 and beyond, perhaps a new and innovative approach to how the regulated asset base is now also needed.

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