Abstract
Performance assessment is essential to effectively evaluate and monitor the activity of water utilities, support decision making, and encourage continuous improvement. Performance assessment systems (PAS), covering several service objectives and criteria, have been successfully applied in water supply and wastewater systems. Tailored approaches focusing on the assessment of the energy use and efficiency in wastewater systems are still limited. This paper aims at the development and demonstration of a comprehensive PAS for energy efficiency, tailored for wastewater systems, incorporating criteria related to energy consumption, operation and maintenance (O&M) costs, and environmental impacts, such as untreated discharges and greenhouse gases emissions, among others. Management and control of excessive or undue inflows to these systems is specifically addressed by several novel criteria and metrics. The proposed PAS should be adapted by each utility to be aligned with the objectives of the organisation and with the implemented asset management strategy. The proposed approach and the resulting consolidated PAS are thoroughly described. Results from the application of the PAS to several Portuguese utilities are discussed. This PAS aims at contributing to a reliable and replicable process to assess energy efficiency in wastewater systems and to encourage a more rational energy management.
Highlights
Urban water systems performance is of the utmost importance for responding to current and future challenges in urban areas
The performance assessment systems (PAS) in the scope of energy efficiency in wastewater systems should be aligned with the strategic objectives of the wastewater utilities since this alignment is one of the main difficulties of utilities [38]
Not all the proposed metrics could be calculated by the wastewater utilities due to the lack of available data
Summary
Urban water systems performance is of the utmost importance for responding to current and future challenges in urban areas. Energy efficiency is a fundamental topic for the water sector [2,3,4,5], with implications to water utilities, the users, and the society in terms of economic and financial sustainability and environmental performance. According to [8], the water and wastewater sectors accounted for 3.5% of electricity use in the EU in 2018, and this share is expected to rise in the short and medium terms. Despite water supply having a larger share of this consumption (62% in 2015), wastewater systems have an large consumption that cannot be ignored [9]. The referred directive requires the Member States to achieve cumulative end-use energy savings by setting ambitious targets for 2030 and emphasising that “the effective management of water can make a significant contribution to energy savings” [8]
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