An award winning design wastewater case study at Westnewton WwTW

This equipment is located upstream of a Nereda® process specifically designed for smaller works. (Royal HaskoningDHV has developed small (Package) and medium scale (Mini) solutions for 200-2,000 PE and 2,000-5,000 PE respectively, with support from UU and C2V+ United Utilities’ construction design partner.)

This scheme sought to use as much equipment delivered in the DfMA (built off sire) format as possible and from HUBER Technology’s perspective, this opened up the opportunity to develop this further with Advance plus and C2V+, the CDP’s for United Utilities. As a result of this together we developed a truly collaborative way of working to reduce costs and improve efficiencies to deliver United Utilities (UU) AMP7 programme. The approach focused on partnership, collaboration, trust that compliment UU AMP7 requirements to outperform against their Company Business Plan (CBP) and benefit all parties.

The solution was initially developed on Advance-plus projects at Southwaite and Greystoke WwTW. It was subsequently adopted by C2V+ at Gawsworth WwTW with several other projects in the pipeline. The highlights of this approach are:

• A £30K (35%) saving in capital cost against a bespoke solution at £80k.
• An annual ongoing saving of £8,600pa against historical, conventional installations.

Utilisation of standard steel products instead of bespoke civil channels – saved £11k – 12% i.e.:

• Standard off-the shelf designs.
• Simplified asset standards.
• Reduced civil construction.

DfMA off-site build saved £15k – 18% i.e.:

• 5 weeks site time saved.
• Safer assembly.
• Lower carbon solutions >70% reduction.
• Less waste.
• Factory based quality assurance (100%).
• Less travel and fuel costs.
• Interface management and out-turn cost certainty.
• Offsite testing and dry commissioning.

Programme and design work saved £4.1k – 5% - Common product specifications and configuration, reduced design turbulence – less iteration i.e.:

• Estimating – standard estimating blocks.
• Procurement – Avoidance of multiple quotes, proforma subcontract (proforma agreements).
• Planning & Scheduling – standard timeframes for procurement lead time, installation and commissioning.
• Safety - Template HAZOP and Access, Lifting and Maintenance (ALM) agreements, reduced travel and meetings (Do it once).
• Standard commissioning protocols, maintenance and spares familiarity.
• Agreed OPEX costings for Investment Appraisal Analysis and WLC reporting. 

Ongoing savings through.

• Lower operating costs – defined by the historical data findings.
• Operator familiarity.
• Ongoing 35% capital savings on future schemes.
• £8,600pa – maintenance and operating costs.

This piece of work was shortlisted for the 2021 Water Industry Awards for the Alliancing and Partnership Initiative.

Dale Foster - Area Manager for HUBER Technology:

“It has been both a pleasure and hard work over a long period of time to arrive at standard inlet screening package solutions for deployment on United Utilities projects targeting small inlet works. The potential for efficiency savings that this approach offers throughout the AMP period and beyond is there for all to see. With the resulting improvement in quality, cost and time together with reduced health and safety risk and carbon emissions, it’s quite a result. 

It looks and sounds simple when seeing the results in writing but a lot of people throughout all the organisations mentioned put in a deal of hard work and diligence. Hopefully, as with other water companies, the potential this approach offers for other work streams can also be realised.

The kit installed on this site will no doubt provide reliable and trouble free service for many years to come. Many of its Ro9 screen predecessors that are installed throughout the United Utilities region are well into 20+ years of service and prove very undemanding from an OPEX perspective. I am certain this will be the case at Westnewton WwTW.”