Data offers insights into every drop

Anglian Water supplies more than six million customers across East Anglia and Hartlepool with water and water recycling services. As part of its “love every drop” commitment, the company works to efficiently manage and conserve water supplies as well as raise customer recognition of what a precious resource water is.

A key part of Anglian Water’s strategy is to implement a smart metering scheme. It aims to roll out smart metering across the entire region by 2030. The company identified the important need to work with a technology that would help to protect and secure customer data as well as offering the compute and analytics capabilities able to handle the huge quantity of data involved.

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Early success in trial

The smart metering trial underway since 2018 has already demonstrated early success. Sarah Castelvecchi, Water Saving Manager at Anglian Water, explains, “We’ve been able to deliver an eleven percent reduction in demands across households within these areas.”

This has been made possible by the ability to identify customer-side leaks and by customers adapting their own behaviours as they begin to better understand how much water they use.

“It offers us the ability to understand how our customers use water,” says Doug Spencer, Head of Smart Metering at Anglian Water, “and, hence, the best advice we can give our customers as to how they could save water.”

Microsoft Azure has been key

Paul Slavinski is a senior data consultant at Anglian Water EIM Alliance. He says, “Using tools from Microsoft like Microsoft Azure Data Lake and Azure Data Factory pipelines, we’re able to pull it together into a more robust system.”

As well as the customer-side smart metering, Anglian Water is also using the data lake as the basis for monitoring and analysis of its network. The company uses AI tools in Microsoft Azure to understand the behaviour of reservoirs under different conditions, including time of day, seasonality and meteorological.

“For us, Microsoft Azure was key,” says Reece Cook, senior data scientist at Anglian Water EIM Alliance. “We use Microsoft Azure Databricks and that has honestly changed the way we work. There was no way that a human would be able to look through that much data and determine if there was a problem. Really, in this case, it was a problem that could only be solved by AI.”

The basis of decision making

“As we scale up our smart metering programme from our trial to our five-year programme and up to 2030,” says Castelvecchi, “we need a platform like Microsoft Azure that is scalable, high performing and also is a robust service that ensures we’ve got that level of security around our customers’ data but also provides the insights and the level of information we need as a business to inform our decision making.”

“Microsoft Azure Databricks has honestly changed the way we work. There was no way that a human would be able to look through that much data and determine if there was a problem. Really, in this case, it was a problem that could only be solved by AI.”

Reece Cook, Senior data scientist, Anglian Water