Energy Management
Electricity is one of the largest controllable costs at a water treatment plant, and there are three different ways to approach it, depending on where you are today and what you’re prepared to consider.
Open to spot price exposure? Demand Response assesses the business case for moving some or all of your load onto the wholesale spot market, and designs the pump scheduling to capture the opportunity without compromising treatment performance.
Want to improve on your current tariff without changing it? Tariff Optimisation finds the operational changes available within your existing retail contract, so you capture savings without changing your risk position.
Weighing up a new retail offer? Alternate Tariffs uses the same simulation approach to model how your plant would perform under alternative tariff structures, so you can compare offers on realistic operating outcomes rather than headline rates.
CAPEX Business Case Assessment
Considering new equipment? Any of the three services above can be extended into a CAPEX Business Case Assessment — testing whether new or larger assets such as pumps, blowers, storage, solar PV, batteries, anaerobic digestion, cogeneration, or biogas storage would strengthen the outcome.
Where a business case supports moving ahead, Delprosa can also deliver the engineering design and project management through to commissioning — see Delivery Services.
Explore CAPEX Business Case Assessment ->
Why the simulation matters
Electricity strategy tools generally take one of two approaches. Retail and demand response providers can quantify a market opportunity, but without plant-specific process modelling, their recommendations ask you to trust a forecast you can’t verify against your own operating constraints. Generic simulation platforms model the electrical or financial side well, but treat the plant as a simplified load rather than a full operating system, so a change that looks good on one part of the process can quietly create a problem somewhere else.
Delprosa’s approach is built from the plant outward. The simulations are grounded in the same process engineering fundamentals used to design and operate treatment plants, developed over nearly four decades of process and project engineering across water, energy, and industrial operations, and shaped further by PhD research into integrated energy and wastewater systems. That means a recommendation comes with a transparent, plant-specific forecast of what will actually happen, not just to the electricity bill, but across the operation as a whole, so you can see the trade-offs before you commit to a change.
This work is currently focused on wastewater treatment plants, where the operational detail is deepest, but the same simulation approach applies to any plant with flexible, controllable load.
Two things worth knowing
Retail and contract negotiation. Negotiating with your retailer, whether for spot exposure, a hybrid arrangement, or a new tariff structure, is best led by you as the client, since you hold the commercial relationship. Delprosa is available to support those discussions where useful.
Control system implementation. Where a control change is identified, Delprosa can supply the control algorithm for your existing SCADA integrator to implement, or manage the integration directly as part of a project delivery engagement if you’d prefer a single point of contact.