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Anglian Water is one of the leading providers of water and wastewater services in the UK, serving the needs of around six million industrial, commercial and domestic customers.
Brooklyn Consulting designed and developed Anglian Water's Carbon Modeller - an emissions and carbon calculator / Carbon Information Management (CIM) tool for measuring and estimating carbon emissions - in association with Anglian Water's @one Alliance partners: Grontmij, Mott MacDonald and Black & Veatch.
The Carbon Modeller provides support for Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) members to measure the viability and success of climate change adaptation strategies and techniques.
If you'd like to know more, please feel free to email Mark Wolfgramme or call him directly on +44 (7747) 60 88 10.
The Challenge
See 'Measuring the carbon load: @one alliance' and 'Cutting back on carbon: Energy efficiency & the water industry' in the New Civil Engineer.
In response to the Climate Change Bill, the Water Framework Directive and a commitment to reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption, Anglian Water wanted to ensure that it was making environmentally-informed design and capital investment decisions.
Anglian Water needed a carbon measurement tool that could provide designers with the appropriate levels of information relating to the greenhouse gas emissions as they developed capital schemes through Anglian Water's risk and value optioneering intervention stages.
The tool would be used to measure, or estimate from carbon cost curves, the carbon footprint (embodied and operational) of new schemes and support design decisions to allow the lowest whole life carbon cost option to be taken forward for development.
The carbon measuring methodology adopted needed to be UKWIR phase two compliant, and meet OFWAT's whole life carbon requirements. The tool's scheme design methodology needed to align to Anglian Water's asset hierarchy rules, and carbon cost curves (models) that were developed would use the Inventory of Carbon & Energy (ICE), Bath University's aggregated database for embodied energy and carbon [dioxide] emissions associated with engineering materials.
Anglian Water's @one alliance partners would use the tool and Anglian Water's supply chain will provide specific carbon emissions values for specific
supply chain
Project 1 - Risk & Value Intervention Process Analysis
Analysis R&VI process.
The addition of the new activity of measuring associated carbon emissions needed to fit within the existing scheme design process. We analysed the existing process in order to ascertain how the new activity would best fit in.
Project 2 - Information Architecture Analysis
Analysis of the integration sources and scheme design data
Firstly, undertook an analysis of Anglian Water's Asset Hierarchy data structures as these would provide the rules that governed how a scheme, or the components of a scheme, could be designed.
Secondly, we reviewed the structures of the embodied and operational carbon models for assets and asset groups.
Thirdly, we developed the data architecture for the proposed solution
Project 3 - User Interface & Functionality Design
Having understood the process and associated data requirements, we then took an iterative development approach to designing the proposed system's user interface - presenting, reviewing and evolving our designs to the project stakeholders and sponsors.
As we do with business process design, we took a goal-oriented design approach to the Carbon Modeller's UI.
Project 4 - Carbon Modeller Development
Development and testing of the tool.
Once the UI design had been agreed, we undertook development of the Carbon Modeller, with a rolling delivery of tested functionality as and when completed.
This gave the stakeholders and sponsors an opportunity to gradually familiarise themselves with the Carbon Modeller as it evolved.
The Carbon Modeller is a web-based application allowing anyone, with a connection and the relevant access rights, to use the tool from anywhere.
Project 5 - Data Migration
Porting the asset hierarchy rules and embodied and operational carbon model data to the Carbon Modeller.
We took the data from multiple sources/systems and migrated it into the Carbon Modeller.
Project 6 - Anglian Water Energy and Carbon Conference
On December 3rd, 2008, at Anglian Water's annual energy and carbon conference, we presented the Carbon Modeller to a 150-strong audience of water industry and environmental delegates - the first public demonstration of the tool.
We then asked the delegates (in 10 groups) to use the Carbon Modeller to determine the lowest whole life carbon footprint of two different design options (Percolating filters and Activated sludge), each of which would satisfy a similar process requirement, and collectively reviewed the results.
Even though the delegates had only seen a single demonstration example of the Carbon Modeller, they managed to successfully use the tool without much additional assistance.
After the exercise we asked for comments on the first impressions of the Carbon Modeller. The feedback received was very positive; quick to learn, clean and intuitive drag-n-drop interface where very little training would be necessary and immediate results.
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