Why Every Utility Needs a Digital Twin

Why Every Utility Needs a Digital Twin

ESRI AND THE SCIENCE OF WHERE PODCAST: HYDROSUITE

INTRO:
Welcome to the Esri and the Science of Where podcast.

John Young has spent a long time working at the heart of geospatial technology and engineering. He's now Director of Digital Solutions for both facilities and assets at the engineering firm Lingen. Throughout his career, John has been a vocal proponent of things that make life easier, smoother, and simpler, and that's why he's keen on digital twins for complicated systems.

JOHN YOUNG:
Being able to find things and find things fast, whether you're talking about outside infrastructure or the master switch inside of a building, I don't care where you are, being able to find something very quickly is important, whether you're a first responder or somebody on a maintenance team who has to get something turned off.

INTRO:
John Young describes to Esri's John Lenahan why every utility needs a digital twin.

JOHN LENAHAN:
Hi, John. Welcome to the Esri and the Science of Where podcast.

JOHN YOUNG:
Great to be here.

JOHN LENAHAN:
John, we're here to talk about water infrastructure. I've read that the average water network in the U.S. is at least 40 years old, and several are running close to the end of their lives.

That's alarming, especially when you consider how many communities are suffering from droughts and other water shortages. How will bringing that infrastructure into a digital system help?

JOHN YOUNG:
Yeah, it's a really good point, and I'd say you're spot on with your numbers.

First and foremost, when you start to bring all this information into a digital system that is location-based, we want to know where things are, right? You want to know where the infrastructure is.

But digital first, to me, and I think as a facet of our company, is that we care about the asset life cycle. I won't dig too much into that, but the bottom line is it helps you get organized and know where all these assets are so that you can then begin to track and manage them over time.

As we do that, there's a shift from anything that's been on paper into a digital world that can record all that information.

JOHN LENAHAN:
I think the first step with making the data available digitally is now you know what you have.

JOHN YOUNG:
Correct. At the basic level, that's a very good point. The first thing is inventory, right? Get my inventory straight.

Once we have inventory, inventory falls into different buckets. Inventory can mean that I understand, if I look on a map, where something is, but I may not know how far down in the ground it is.

Then there becomes another set of questions that needs to be answered and visualized, especially when you're trying to tell somebody not to dig with a "look before you dig" tool or something like that.

JOHN LENAHAN:
It's hard to understand for me, and probably a lot of our audience, why cities don't already know where this infrastructure is. Can you explain how that has happened and why we're at this point?

JOHN YOUNG:
This is an interesting one, and it kind of depends on the communities that you're in. Sometimes it's a little bit out of sight, out of mind.

In other words, if a problem's not happening, there's not a real reason to address it, right?

Whether it's a residential area or, in some cases, a commercial area, they still need clean water. Then you care about sizing systems to know where they're going to go, if it's a new neighborhood that's being put in or a new business that's being considered.

I would argue that they actually do know where their water lines are, for the most part. Anything that's pressurized with a resource that moves through it, you're going to know pretty much where those resources are.

The mains, the laterals, anything that's getting you down to the meter, also because you're typically charging for that. So that infrastructure, I think, is largely in place, and it's known where those assets are.

Where things get a little more interesting is when it gets into wastewater and stormwater.

JOHN LENAHAN:
Is it also the case that some of that infrastructure may have moved over time for various reasons?

JOHN YOUNG:
Development continues, and things that were once a certain type of property, a residential area, may now have a distribution center on it. Who knows?

The point is, when the ground gets uncovered and things move, you believe that most of the infrastructure associated with it is being moved and reoriented properly, but that may not always be the case.

JOHN LENAHAN:
Today we wanted to talk a little bit about a solution that's relatively new to the market. You're calling it HydroSuite. Can you give us a little bit of the background and also explain how HydroSuite has been positioned to help address some of the issues we're talking about?

JOHN YOUNG:
HydroSuite was kind of born out of Lingen, as an engineering company, to literally support our environmental engineers.

These are folks who are water and wastewater engineers, and those engineers work with a wide range of clients. It could be municipal. A lot of these are commercial entities. Heck, think about big theme parks. They handle lots of water.

They wanted a way to more quickly understand simply where the infrastructure is, where it's located, and they wanted to have technology that could help us improve the way that we actually deliver our services faster to some of these clients.

One of the forerunners is chemicals that can be in the water, these forever chemicals and PFAS, and so we do a lot of that work. Our folks needed better tools to help them understand where these chemicals are, so not just where the infrastructure is, but proximity and those types of things.

JOHN LENAHAN:
Does that include looking for lead in the pipes and lead in the water system?

JOHN YOUNG:
You nailed it. Yeah. We could start going down that whole litany of different types of things that you might start looking for inside the water or the pipes, et cetera.

JOHN LENAHAN:
When you think of water, you think of the water in your house or your sewers. You get the bill every month, right?

A lot of systems to support water infrastructure are about billing, paperwork, and the customer experience. But HydroSuite is different. Can you talk about how that's filling a niche in the market that maybe wasn't addressed?

JOHN YOUNG:
A tool like HydroSuite can be utilized by medium and large municipalities. We like to think of those sometimes as one that might have 10,000 service endpoints. That means I have 10,000 meters, all the way up to ones that may have 25,000, 100,000, or more.

It's about providing the folks at those cities who are responsible for managing that infrastructure with a comprehensive set of tools that lets them not only manage it in the back office, but manage it for folks who have to go out in the field to do investigations and inspections.

It gives them a complete suite of tools that are all location intelligent, know where you are, and that fill or maintain the data about that underground infrastructure.

JOHN LENAHAN:
HydroSuite provides capabilities that reduce outages through smart capabilities. Can you expand on that, and how does that build on what you were just talking about?

JOHN YOUNG:
The smarter capabilities, the way we're presenting these, have more to do with prediction, analytics, and understanding where we may be more prone to having an outage or an incident.

That's the beauty of using the tools that are out there that really are sophisticated with location intelligence, because they integrate very nicely with those sensors.

Now, all of a sudden, when you're wondering where something's happening, you may get a trigger or an alarm on a map, and it's a red dot that's flashing.

Or, over time, I can look at a trend and see a hotspot on a map that shows me that we seem to have a concentration of events in this one location. Maybe we should go investigate it more.

JOHN LENAHAN:
And that's the idea of predictive maintenance, where you're using the information and location intelligence to actually direct effort.

So it's in the field. You want to know, at a precision level, which valve to shut off to minimize whatever downstream effects are happening. On the planning side, how does location support those efforts?

JOHN YOUNG:
On the planning side, it's interesting. What do you do when somebody submits a project with the county and says, "Hey, we're developing this piece of land, and we want to put a neighborhood of 100 people in there," and it gets approved?

Now it's approved, but a lot of times throughout that process, we have to actually "size a system" that's going to receive water. I've got to now provide water to, like we said earlier, 100 new endpoints or 100 new meters.

We will typically bring in tools from some of the partners that we work with that help us do that sizing. Basically, you're engineering and understanding the size of the water mains, the laterals, and things like that, and how to support that infrastructure.

So we use location-based analysis and tools from the very beginning part of that process, planning, until it's actually put in the ground.

JOHN LENAHAN:
With all good ideas, it seems obvious once someone's done it. How did you convince these organizations to change and these users to adopt this new technology, these new tools, and this new way of working?

JOHN YOUNG:
In some cases, it was a really quick transition because they were already using a number of tools that were location-based or map-based.

But they did want that clean user experience that goes from the office to the field and back to the office, so you get those results almost instantly.

The other thing is that a number of these users are looking to use more sophisticated location analysis tools. They care that if a water line breaks or if I get harmful chemicals spilled into my wastewater line, I'd like to hit a button and trace to find the point source of that pollution.

Or I'd like to understand where the valves are that I need to cut off. Some may be obvious. Some may not be so obvious.

JOHN LENAHAN:
So one of the benefits of this solution is that everyone in the organization now has the same truth.

JOHN YOUNG:
Yeah, the same source of truth.

A lot of times, we get down to the three principles or core value tenets of any of these solutions, and mitigating or reducing risk is always one of the top ones.

Now you've got a very clean interface for understanding where a risk might be and how to quickly resolve that.

We could also talk about improvements in cost efficiency or even just operations because everybody is, again, like you just said, seeing through the same pane of glass, if you will.

JOHN LENAHAN:
How does location play into those three pillars?

JOHN YOUNG:
Being able to find things and find things fast, whether you're talking about outside infrastructure or the master switch inside of a building, I don't care where you are, being able to find something very quickly is important.

Whether you're a first responder or somebody on a maintenance team who has to get something turned off, it really limits the damage and limits the risk.

We could even traverse this into, if you have a really good, clean app that people understand, it can support multiple generations of staff, because we're having to do that these days.

We need to put some tools in the hands of a young generation coming out of school right now that is craving the mobile-device app. But we need to know that if they're collecting data on that, it's actually feeding the main HydroSuite system.

There also needs to be another companion tool or pane of glass, if you will, that can be operated by someone who may be five years from retirement.

JOHN LENAHAN:
Engineers, as we know, are typically pretty risk-averse. How did you convince them to adopt and really start to leverage these tools?

JOHN YOUNG:
Yeah, it's a really good question. Some of this, fundamentally, gets down to, especially with the engineer, seeing is believing. They need you to show them.

Being an engineer, it's a little more than even just seeing is believing. Your tool works. It's helping me find something. I can see it on the map. But I really care that it's accurately located exactly where you're telling me it is and, if I start using this thing, that it's going to continue to do that.

Then it transfers from seeing is believing and the accuracy of where the infrastructure is located to the collaboration that they have with our survey teams, the instrumentation they use, and that whole collaboration among partners.

JOHN LENAHAN:
A catchphrase that makes some people wary is a system being "future-proof." Can you explain what that means to you and how you think HydroSuite moves in that direction?

JOHN YOUNG:
HydroSuite is built upon technology that has been around and evolving for a lot of years. Very trusted.

JOHN LENAHAN:
So location intelligence technology, geospatial mapping technology that's been around for a long time.

JOHN YOUNG:
Location intelligence. And it's also built on the most modern and contemporary computing environments, if that's a big way to say it.

But when I think about future-proofing, I think about a solution's ability to scale and grow as your assets scale and grow.

When I think about future-proofing, I think about, if I'm going to put the data into that resource, that I can have a high degree of reliability that the system is being well-maintained and accurate.

JOHN LENAHAN:
Any final thoughts on the future of water infrastructure and its management, things to leave the listeners with?

JOHN YOUNG:
Generally speaking, for municipalities and folks that are looking at suites of tools to use for managing their wet utilities, water, wastewater, and stormwater, I do think that you want to start with a location-based approach when it comes to managing your data.

I think HydroSuite certainly provides that, but it's more than just getting the inventory in there.

You need the tools that can help you do the analysis, which is going to help do everything from reducing risk to providing remediation efforts and fixing things faster when they break, because things are always going to break. That's inevitable.

If you have a system that can account for these things that happen through all the normal operations and maintenance, we're talking about optimizing operations here as well, then you can limit that risk in your organization.

The biggest thing for HydroSuite, for us and the platform that it's built on, is making sure that newer technologies that are coming out, and I will say AI, can be implemented and taken advantage of.

For any platform that's coming out that's going to help municipalities, you need to be built on technology and tool suites like HydroSuite that can help you adapt and evolve as generational change happens.

JOHN LENAHAN:
And embrace new ways of computing and new ways of interfacing with technology.

JOHN YOUNG:
Exactly. That's exactly what I was getting at. Yep, you got it.

JOHN LENAHAN:
Great. Well, John, thank you so much for joining us. It was a great conversation. I'm never going to look at my water meter the same.

JOHN YOUNG:
I may not either. Thanks, John.

OUTRO:
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