"The greatest innovation in digital water management will be improving water operators' learning"
The Drinking Water Quality Regulator for Scotland revealed in late August that Scottish Water continues to achieve a high level of compliance with stringent drinking water standards, with 99.88% of tests meeting the required criteria in 2023.
Scottish Water provides essential services to over 5 million customers, delivering more than 1.5 billion litres of drinking water daily. However, the increasing age of infrastructure and the challenges posed by persistent heavy rainfall have put pressure on maintaining its high-water quality standards. As the utility faces these hurdles, the need for substantial investment is clear. Over the next 25 years, an estimated additional £2 billion to £5 billion will be required to maintain service levels and ensure the continued safety and reliability of Scotland’s water supply. In this interview, Paul Weir, Water Quality Excellence Manager at Scottish Water, provides insights into how Scottish Water is addressing these issues, emphasizing their ongoing commitment to climate resilience, water quality, and carbon reduction.
Can you tell me briefly about your career path and current role at Scottish Water?
I’ve been lucky enough to have worked in the field of applied sciences in the Water Industry in Scotland for over 38 years. I hold a Master's in Environmental Sciences and am a chemist at heart, recognized as a Chartered Scientist and a Member of the Royal Society of Chemistry. I love applied academia! In the early days, working for the local council, I had the opportunity to spend some of my time conducting water quality analyses and some of my time discussing what it meant and how to make improvements. I enjoyed the “so what” factor of analysis! This focus has stayed with me through all my working years as I progressed through Technician, Advisor, Scientist, and Team Leader roles and onto heading up the Water Quality Excellence function for Scottish Water for the last 15 years. I currently work with a team of approximately 40 Drinking Water Operational Scientists across the length and breadth of Scotland and proudly represent Scottish Water at many national and international steering groups, conferences and events sharing their great work. My greatest joy remains to chat with the team about the “why” or ”so what” factors of water quality.
How is Scottish Water’s record investment of around a billion pounds a year in repairing, renewing, and replacing vital assets contributing to its climate resilience and water quality plans?
Over the past decade, we have been responding to the climate challenge, assessing the risks, and building resilience to climate change into our business and investment plans for key priorities such as water quality, water resources and flood alleviation. The climate threat is accelerating in Scotland year after year as we feel the effects of more extreme events on an ageing asset base. What becomes essential is that we consider the impacts, both of the short-term seasonal effects (droughts, cloud bursts, snow events, storms, hard freezes) alongside the more gradual medium to longer-term temperature change effects (“plan for 2 °C increases, prepare for 4 °C increases this coming century”).
At the forefront of our efforts is the commitment to working in partnerships, ensuring that we operate at the cutting edge of current thinking
We are actively developing our asset base to create: data intelligence and risk platforms that enable predictive insights, efficient and effective Operational Mitigation Plans that drive swift action, and robust, equitable investment strategies that deliver long-term solutions — all while staying committed to our environmental goals, including achieving net zero by 2040. At the forefront of our efforts is the commitment to working in partnerships, ensuring that we operate at the cutting edge of current thinking, always taking cognisance of the great expertise out there in the form of our suppliers, consultants, other water utility experiences and, of course, academia.
How have the applications of ion exchange and ceramic membrane technologies, researched in collaboration with PWNT, helped Scottish Water address the impacts of climate change on upland drinking water sources?
The climate threat is accelerating in Scotland year after year as we feel the effects of more extreme events on an ageing asset base
Scotland’s catchment base is heavily surface water, upland, rich in organic peatland (around 85% of our upland catchments contain organic rich soils). This presents us with real challenges when we combine this with our climate pressures in terms of the variability, quantity and characteristics of our organic materials requiring treatment (inclusive of Cryptosporidium). Ion exchange and membrane technologies have moved to the forefront of our asset adaptation planning as these technologies are fantastic at providing safe, highly effective treatment and can be designed and built off-site in a manner consistent with our great environmental and embodied carbon aspirations.
Our latest Ceramic Membrane Plant was fully constructed off-site and transported in individual modular treatment units – significantly reducing the environmental impact and local community disruption. The new works included renewable energy generation and the method of build and material choice resulted in significant reductions in steel, concrete and hence carbon - and amazing water quality! A great example of how working in collaboration with excellent partners can deliver for you, the environment and your customers.
What digital tools are currently in use by Scottish Water to detect and address pollutants in rivers and lakes?
Having robust, reliable, sensitive, low maintenance, ISO accredited on-line water quality monitoring instrumentation, not only within our catchments, but throughout our treatment processes is incredibly important. Both from a risk management perspective and an environmentally friendly one. It would be reasonable to highlight that we are working extremely hard in this space, but equally remain a bit in the explore space for now with particular regards to “nxt gen, on-line, real-time, analysis” – which is probably everyone’s holy grail. Our Research & Innovation, Transformation, Environmental Planning & Assurance and Water Operational Teams are working hand in hand with external academic and research institutes to deliver something of real value here.
We have been responding to the climate challenge, assessing risks, and building resilience in our business and investment plans
It would be fair to say that flow monitors, multi-sensor buoys, on-line bacterial cell counting, particle charge analysers, multi-spectral UV analysers, artificial intelligence machine learning, and digital twins (list not exhaustive…) are uppermost in our thoughts and we remain highly motivated to drive a step change in our enhanced, fast, digital wisdom that brings further depth and colour to our current Risk Management Platforms and Regulatory laboratory analysis programmes.
“Forever chemicals” were found in Scottish drinking water in 2023. How is Scottish Water working towards eliminating PFAS from drinking water?
Ion exchange and membrane technologies have become central to our asset adaptation planning, offering safe and highly effective treatment
As new technologies bring new windows of understanding to water quality and their health risks, it remains important that we always strive to continue to improve on the very high standards that we are already hitting. PFAS has quite rightly increased in focus in the last few years as methods for their detection and analysis have improved.
Thankfully in Scotland, although PFAS remains a key parameter for us and very much remains on our watch list, following several years of extensive risk assessment and analysis, due to the nature and location of the majority of our catchments, our risks are relatively low and limited to only a very small number of locations. Nevertheless, we’ve been actively engaging with academia to better understand the most effective removal technologies. Alongside looking at catchment elimination and wastewater treatment to limit inputs, technologies such as membrane treatment, ion exchange, and activated carbon (known water treatment technologies already in use in Scotland) remain highly effective for PFAS removal and very much open to us to utilise as and when is required.
How is Scottish Water working with its delivery partners and wider supply chain to reduce carbon emissions in construction, and what role do these collaborations play in achieving your carbon reduction goals?
At Scottish Water we operate a “carbon reduction hierarchy” and a “20 Golden Rules” philosophy when working with our delivery partners and wider supply chains. Carbon is a key consideration for us on every project and we engage with our investment partners in these discussions right from the start of every undertaking.
Carbon is a key consideration for us on every project and we engage with our investment partners in these discussions right from the start
Build nothing, Build less, Build clever, Build efficiently is our hierarchical rule set and our Golden Rules include for a consideration of: the re-purposing of our old assets, using low carbon materials, end-of-life considerations and actively seeking to install renewables in all new assets. Our Ceramic Membrane Plant discussed above is a great example of how we always strive to put carbon reduction, environmental care and local community concerns at the heart of all our investment decisions and great partnerships are a brilliant way of achieving these goals.
What innovations in digital water management do you see having the most significant impact on future water quality improvements?
It's clear that there's significant potential in advancing basic water quality management. Utilizing AI to quickly identify key data sources via chatbots, developing chemical dosing control algorithms through machine learning on simulated data sets, and leveraging data lakes to highlight emerging risks are all promising avenues. Additionally, transitioning to Remote Operating Centres, where pump adjustments can be made from 100 miles away, will undoubtedly offer tremendous value. I would even include Digital Twins to model and predict the impacts of climate change.
However, in my opinion, the greatest innovations of significance in the digital water management world will come in enhancing the learning of water operators. As new technologies advance exponentially, emerging parameters of importance appear yearly, climate risks rocket and mental health and well-being become the new pandemic. I would love to see an increasing investment in some of these new innovative water management digital tools to help support, educate and develop our friends and colleagues in front-line water operations. It is the water operators who must ultimately understand, operate, and maintain performance against all of these aforementioned challenges, 24/7/52. Innovating, building, and supporting their resilience through digital excellence - in combination with the “build something” fixes - is my pick in assuring our future water quality performance. Our people remain our most important asset.