MOSL awards second round of Market Improvement Funding

Eight bids have received a total of £740,000 funding in the second round of the Strategic Panel’s Market Improvement Fund. A ninth bid remains under review. There were 13 bids in all, seeking a total of £1.4m.

The successful projects summarised

RWG Wholesale Tariff Simplification Development

Applicant: Business Stream on behalf of the RWG

Sponsor: Thames Water

Following an industry-wide consultation to seek feedback on ideas to simplify wholesale tariffs, the RWG Tariff Simplification Sub-Group will be working with a consultant to explore and refine a number of options, where more technical expertise is required. These include simplifying and aligning volumetric tariff bands across wholesale regions; simplifying and aligning the bands for fixed meter charges; and aligning water and waste tariff bands.

Automated Water Efficiency Audits

Applicant and Sponsor: Wave Utilities

This project will use Internet of Things (IoT) technology (water event metering) across a pilot of 250 customers, creating a low-cost way of decreasing average consumption in small commercial premises. It does this by providing the customer with consumption insight per outlet and creating business cases for them by using point of consumption data in real-time.

The primary output of the project is a blueprint for understanding of how smaller customers could engage in water efficiency measures, what works best and will enable MOSL members to use the best practice learnings to create new commercial propositions.

REDUCED – Raising Efforts to Drive User Consumption Efficaciously Down

Applicant: Isle Utilities

Sponsor: Wave Utilities

The REDUCED project will create a searchable online portal, giving retailers access to emerging technologies that will address customer pain-points, and verified technology developers access to retailers for trial opportunities. The portal will serve as a collaborative tool, enabling users to develop new skills and behaviours, and further driving competition and the water efficiency profile of the non-household market.

Meter Condition Assessment

Applicant and Sponsor: Wave Utilities

Delivery Partner: Occutrace

This project will investigate 2,000 varied supply points (SPIDs) with zero-consuming meters (suspected to be broken) across all wholesalers to establish their state and provide a source of evidential data that outlines the extent to which manually read meters are contributing to the lack of accurate consumption data in the market.

Project ‘Discovery’ – NHH customer segmentation and consumption benchmarking

Applicant and sponsor: Anglian Water Services

Delivery partner: Artesia Consulting

Project ‘Discovery’ aims to better understand the potential contribution of the non-household water market to the wider demand challenges facing the industry and inform water resource management planning. It will look at testing the value of customer segmentation and consumption benchmarking in delivering demand reduction, which will result in the development of a national consumption benchmarking model that can be applied across the industry.

NAPS Data Quality Cleanse

Applicant: IDenteq

Sponsor: MOSL

IDenteq will target New and Partial supply points (NAPS), in an exercise to drive significant improvement to the quality of market data. The project will analyse NAPS to confirm which properties are genuine business connections, which are domestic and should be de-registered, and which connections have completed and should now be tradable in the market. Reports will be freely available to trading parties to help them cleanse any errors and improve overall data quality and create a template for trading parties to manage their own enduring processes to enable the data quality improvements to be maintained.

Consumption Awareness and Benchmarking. To utilise granular consumption data for improved market outcomes

Applicant: Yorkshire Water

Sponsor: MOSL

Delivery Partner: Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA)

This project aims to address the ongoing issue of how to make the best use of trading parties’ differing sets of granular consumption data for non-household customers by finding a way to actively share this data with the market operator. It will utilise granular trading party consumption data already collected via smart metering and data logging activity to create methodologies to assist the market and explore ways to accurately forecast non-household demand.

Business voids research to inform optimum market outcomes

Applicants and Sponsors: Yorkshire Water and Business Stream

Delivery Partner: Economic Insight

Yorkshire Water and Business Stream will lead a comprehensive review of reform options to lessen the number of premises that are incorrectly considered to be “void” properties in the non-household market. This project will seek to provide trading parties, MOSL and Ofwat with insight which will support decision making (including PR24 plans), ultimately leading to optimal delivery of customer outcomes including fair bills.