24 | 20TH - 26TH JULY 2018 | UTILITY WEEK

Operations & Assets

Utility Week Awards winner case study

Capital Project Management Award

Award winner: Anglian Water• Title of project/initiative: The Grafham

Resilience Scheme• Annual company turnover:

£1.2 million• Number of directly-employed staff:

4,000

Entry criteria:• Entry criteria: Quality of entry (clear,

evidence based etc)• On time and on budget• Relationship with supply chain• Impact on customers and wider

community• Health and safety performance• Evidence of innovation

The Utility Week Awards are held in asso-ciation with CGI and Capgemini.

The 2018 Utility Week Awards have now been launched. See pages 28-29, and https://www.utilityweekawards.co.uk/For sponsorship opportunities please contact Utility Week business devel-opment manager Ben Hammond on benhammond@fav-house.com or 01342 332116 for more information

The £28 million Grafham Resilience Scheme is an innovative programme from Anglian Water that reverses water

flow in the event of an emergency. Seventy-five per cent of the 829,000 peo-

ple in the Huntingdon, Northampton and Bedford areas served by Grafham Water Treatment Works would be affected in the event of an outage in its network.

So to combat the risk, Anglian wanted to install a major water main between Hanning-ton Reservoir and Grafham. But it transpired that route would have presented significant hurdles for the company, with river crossings and urban areas among the obstacles in the way. The resilience scheme at Grafham has achieved the same outcome, but at half the cost. It has also cut embodied carbon by 61 per cent (26,845 tonnes), compared with what would have been used by the Hanning-ton water main.

What was the scale of the project?To deal with these challenges, Anglian had to come up with a radical approach. Through ground-breaking adjustments, monitoring the pipe network and new ways of working, the team successfully allowed the reversal of flow through one of the existing water mains.

During the project the team made 56 con-nections to live water mains without any interruption to customers. A typical regional operations team would undertake just 26 such connections annually.

The largest such connection had the potential to affect 400,000 customers, but through efficient execution, none were affected. Over the course of the project, a total of 6,000 cubic metres of concrete was used to construct the reservoir tank, mak-ing it the largest pre-cast storage reservoir in Europe.

The new storage reservoir holds 40 mil-lion litres of treated drinking water, equiva-lent to 16 Olympic-sized swimming pools. If a kitchen tap was turned on in one corner it would take five years to drain the reservoir.

What was the target group?Anglian serves some of the fastest-growing parts of the UK, and with significant popula-tion growth predicted over the next 25 years the company needs ever-resilient systems to meet the challenges of this growth, as well as to protect the environment.

It is forecast that more than a quarter of a million new homes will be built by 2036 and more than 380,000 jobs are expected to be created across Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire

A total of 6,000 cubic metres of

concrete was used to construct the reservoir tank, making it the largest pre-cast storage reservoir in Europe.

Going green was capital ideaAnglian Water won the 2017 Utility Week Capital Project Management Award for its Grafham Resilience Scheme. We look at how this £28 million ground-breaking project was delivered.

UTILITY WEEK | 20TH - 26TH JULY 2018 | 25

Operations & Assets

What the judges said...The judges praised the clarity of the entry, saying it was well explained and well presented. They said it was “a fantastic example project for the industry,” adding: “You can feel the pride in this project.”

and Northamptonshire, the area Grafham serves. Yet with only half the national aver-age rainfall each year, the east of England is the driest region in the UK.

The resilience scheme at Grafham Water Treatment Works has significantly increased the security of water supplies to customers in the west of their region.

Why this approach?The team cites a ground-breaking 2015 trial, challenging the status quo, and collabora-tion across various teams as enabling factors behind the scheme. As with any infrastruc-ture project, Anglian needed to work to halve embodied carbon before seeking agreement to proceed.

What were the KPIs?The key performance indicators (KPIs) included halving embodied carbon and con-struction time and avoiding any accidents. The Grafham scheme achieved all of these, with no health and safety incidents through-out the entire project.

The initial Hannington design was fore-cast to cost £60 million and use 43,648 tonnes of carbon, while the final scheme cost £28 million and used 16,803 tonnes of car-bon, saving a total of 26,845 tonnes of CO2 (62 per cent).

How was creativity demonstrated?Collaboration enabled the project team to rethink the original solution. Networks man-ager Karl Porter led the enabling project, which challenged the status quo from the outset as it was a networks expert provid-ing a fresh perspective to managing a supply scheme.

Karl also brought infrastructure modeller

Kirsty Jones out into the field to get a better understanding of the equipment and opera-tions and how to use them to update the hydraulic model.

Working on site at night, Jones was able to take first-hand notes of the system opera-tions. That night testing and data recording enabled the teams to build confidence in the variable speed pumps (VSP) operations. Eventually they were able to operate the VSPs at a level outside the normal design specification and still achieve controlled, stable operations.

The reduced carbon and cost combined allowed £40 million to be reinvested to fund more renewables, generating even further efficiencies for the business.

CollaborationThis scheme demonstrated collaboration across water networks, water supply and asset management. The project was delivered by Anglian Water’s @OneAlliance, with deliv-ery partners Mott MacDonald and JN Bentley (now Mott MacDonald Bentley, MMB).

In addition to the Anglian Water asset delivery team, the other @OneAlliance

partners were Balfour Beatty, Barhale, Mott MacDonald Bentley (MMB), Stantec, Skanska and Sweco.

HurdlesIn addition to having to achieve the 50 per cent carbon-saving KPI, the flow reversal trial itself was fraught with engineering chal-lenges that the teams overcame, while main-taining supplies to customers throughout.

A total of 200 man-hours were spent mod-elling the variable speed pumps and equip-ment vital to the success of the 2015 flow reversal trial.

The scheme also saw partners JN Bentley carry out one of the largest line stops in its engineering history to enable the company to weld on to a bitumen pipe without having to drain down the sizeable main.

The approach of reusing existing equip-ment enabled a cheaper, lower carbon solu-tion to be proposed. The scheme also the Carbon Reduction Project of the Year award at the British Construction Industry Awards.

What was the cost of the project?In total the project cost £28 million and took a quarter of a million man-hours to complete the construction of the new reservoir and pumping station and to carry out the numer-ous network adjustments.

Winner’s comments

“The Grafham Resilience is not just a concrete storage reservoir or a scheme to connect existing pipes. It’s a case study in ‘can do’ attitude, challenging the status quo and collaboration across our business.

“That attitude is what delivered such a huge reduction in carbon and cost and has ultimately allowed £40 million to be reinvested to fund more renewables.

“Yes it takes time and effort to pull off, but look at the results.” CHRIS NEWSOME, DIRECTOR OF ASSET MANAGEMENT, ANGLIAN WATER Anglian Water on awards night