Scottish Water is set to invest up to £100m in technology to monitor its sewage pipes following successful trials.

It said that investment in systems including remote sensors is set to improve its service to customers, protect the environment, reduce costs and assist in its journey towards net zero carbon emissions.

The systems are designed to avoid the need to rely on customers alerting Scottish Water when there is a problem. The early stages of investment of up to £100m over the next five years in the technology have indicated that the utility will be able to better predict and prevent wastewater issues before they impact customers and the environment.

Wastewater is a key focus of Scottish Water’s drive to introduce cost and efficiency savings via an transformation programme, with the objective of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

Trials of the new technology have shown that it will give the company real-time insights into how its network is operating and enable it to be more proactive in how it responds to issues and to solve problems before customers and the environment are affected.

The technology is currently being trialled in four areas – Erskine, Inverness, Lossiemouth and East Calder – which have suffered from flooding and pollution events historically.

Scottish Water has placed sensors that detect the presence of blockages and has already used this data to avert potential environmental pollution incidents (EPIs) and flooding of customers’ premises.

Using the lessons from these four areas, Scottish Water intends to extend the approach into other areas that experience similar issues. Scottish Water provides drinking water to 2.46 million households and 150,000 business customers. The utility clears about 36,000 blockages from its network every year. About 80% of these are caused by people flushing the wrong items, such as wet wipes, down toilets or pouring fats, oil and grease down sinks.

Similarly, at its wastewater treatment assets, a major challenge for the business is that there is little access to real-time data regarding the quality of treatment or the condition and performance. As a result, maintenance is more responsive than predictive, energy consumption is higher than it could be, and asset life is potentially shortened.

The full news story can be read here.