Managing NRW on Large Dia mains - The UK’s move from Estimation to Flow Balances - Ken Cartwright

Ken Cartwright (AtkinsRéalis) has worked in the UK water industry for over 28years , delivering projects within the UK and international covering many difference aspects of clean water network design, network modelling, performance monitoring, and Non-Revenue Water, which has seen him lead a team for 3 years delivering over 22Ml/d of leakage savings through pressure management and in 2017, receive an ‘Innovational Insight’ award from STW for his ‘Network Watch Concept’. More recently he was the Technical Review on the NetCreate Lahan, Nepal project (part of charitable support to WaterAid’s Beacon project by Anglian Water), joined the AtkinsRéalis Assurance team auditing water companies within the UK, was the UKWIR Technical lead on Best Practice for upstream flow monitoring zones and helped to setup and facilitate the Upstream Leakage Group.

“Upstream Assets (Trunk mains) are the arteries of our water supply networks that ensure water keeps flowing out of customer taps, but they are also the assets that cause the most catastrophic supply events and damage on failure. With that in mind it makes no sense that historically they have been the poor relation with regards to full and accurate sensing, monitoring and maintenance”

Ken will provide a view of how the UKs approach to Non-Revenue Water left ‘Upstream areas’ behind and how that is changing since the issue of the study. He will also cover some of the key learnings identified during the study and how the development of a more holistic approach to Network Monitoring strategies so to align system hierarchies could provide wider benefits as well as improving our accounting for every drop of water extracted from the environment and supplied to customers.