#1 Small Scale Action | Nevers, France

The Water Utility team at Nevers Agglomération is in charge of managing the drinking water distribution for 11 of the 13 towns of Nevers Agglomeration, and supervising a telemetry network which controls and monitors 4 treatment plants, 14 water tanks, 400 km of water pipes, 1.4 million m3 produced per year. Their objective: to deliver the best quality service to +12 500 consumers. In order to achieve this, the Water Utility team invested in a premium telemetry solution to control & monitor the entire drinking water network, with 22 cyber-secured Remote Units controlling all strategic sites, and 66 data loggers to monitor critical points such as daily volumes, and min, max, average & night flow rates. As in all telemetry networks, their system centralizes all the data coming from the field, process it and display all their KPIs in several mimics. A system such as the one in use is relevant to manage in real-time a water network but cannot always address all data analytics use cases.

This opened an opportunity for a new experimental enhancement using the Small-Scale Action line of the IoTXchange network. For this, and following a cooperation initiated for the SIIVIM 2020, the water utility team asked the company LACROIX to develop and industrialize intuitive analytics dashboards able to correlate data coming from their telemetry network & GIS application, and bring advanced visualization. The objective? To inject their expertise into an Analytics application, to better understand the water network, ant to predict leakages and reduce Non Revenue Water.

Following the installation of sensors connected to the territory's water network, an application to analyze the data collected by this technology was developed. Previously, the recorded data was collected and analyzed manually, a long and tedious daily task but necessary to detect a problem on the network (leak), storage or production facilities. Now anomalies are detected more quickly and more precisely, allowing effective intervention. The data is automatically transmitted to the application, which will analyze and compare it in order to locate a potential leak.

200,000 m3 of water are saved each year, equivalent to the consumption of 2,000 subscribers. The saving is not only made on water, it is indeed 140 megawatts of electricity which are no longer used for the production and distribution of this water (lost) on the territory, i.e. a saving of 22,000 €/year which can be reinvested in the network.

"This experiment will be one the first stones towards the future bigger IoT platform project that will be the core of our IAP, as highlighted in our different ULG meetings. The objective of it being to gather data from different IoTs, thus allowing to have a global analysis from these, which could then be used as policy instrument." Elise GERVAIS, Nevers IoTXchange project coordinator

Check out the video prepared by Nevers Agglomération, available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/yDAbtp7LF0U