Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

An Analysis of Electricity Consumption Patterns in the Water and Wastewater Sectors in South East England, UK

Aman Majid
* ORCID logo ,
Iliana Cardenes
ORCID logo ,
Conrad Zorn
ORCID logo ,
Tom Russell
ORCID logo ,
Keith Colquhoun
,
René Bañares-Alcántara
,
Jim W. Hall
Version 1 : Received: 26 November 2019 / Approved: 27 November 2019 / Online: 27 November 2019 (03:44:36 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Majid, A.; Cardenes, I.; Zorn, C.; Russell, T.; Colquhoun, K.; Bañares-Alcantara, R.; Hall, J.W. An Analysis of Electricity Consumption Patterns in the Water and Wastewater Sectors in South East England, UK. Water 2020, 12, 225. Majid, A.; Cardenes, I.; Zorn, C.; Russell, T.; Colquhoun, K.; Bañares-Alcantara, R.; Hall, J.W. An Analysis of Electricity Consumption Patterns in the Water and Wastewater Sectors in South East England, UK. Water 2020, 12, 225.

Abstract

The water and wastewater sectors are energy-intensive, and so a growing number of utility companies are seeking to identify opportunities to reduce energy use. Though England’s water sector is of international interest, in particular due to the early experience with privatisation, for the time being very little published data on energy usage exists. We analyse telemetry data from Thames Water Utilities Ltd. (TWUL), which is the largest water and wastewater company in the UK and serves one of the largest mega-cities in the world, London. In our analysis, we (1) break down sectoral energy use into their components, (2) present a statistical method to analyse the long-term trends in use, as well as the seasonality and irregular effects in the data, (3) derive energy-intensity (kWh m3) figures for the system, and (4) compare the energy-intensity of the network against other regions in the world. Our results show that electricity use grew during the period 2009 to 2014 due to capacity expansions to deal with growing water demand and storm water flooding. The energy-intensity of the system is within the range of reported figures for systems in other OECD countries. Plans to improve the efficiency of the system could yield benefits in lower the energy-intensity, but the overall energy saving would be temporary as external pressures from population and climate change are driving up water and energy use.

Keywords

water–energy nexus; energy use; energy intensity

Subject

Engineering, Energy and Fuel Technology

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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