Minimize Pumping Costs and Energy Consumption

Pumping costs account for a high proportion of a water utility’s operating budget, so it’s important that energy consumption is actively managed and minimized as much as possible. With WaterCAD and WaterGEMS, minimizing energy cost is as easy as A-B-C.

WaterCAD/WaterGEMS help water utilities reduce their pumping costs and energy usage in numerous ways, including:

• Identifying old pumps that no longer perform on their pump curves
• Detecting pumps that no longer match well with the distribution system
• Finding pump combinations that do not work well together
• Analyzing when to use variable speed vs. constant speed pumping
• Determining energy costs for different operating rules to find the best operational strategy
• Providing optimal pump operation schedules (coming up in November 2009)
• Determining how to take advantage of time-of-day energy pricing

Most utilities can find places where their pumping operation is not optimal and simply changing a pump (or impeller) or modifying operation can have a dramatic payoff. WaterCAD/WaterGEMS energy cost management tools can take the work out of finding and correcting these pumping energy problems.

WaterCAD/WaterGEMS Energy Cost Management Tools

Convenient Energy Cost Manager

In order to estimate what energy costs are going to be in the future or to make design choices that result in energy efficiency, the included Energy Cost Manager:

• Performs multiple energy analyses with alternative pricing for pumping stations in different parts of the system.
• Considers the effects of storage on cost of running the system.
• Returns many results for operational strategy comparisons:
  daily cost, usage cost, overall energy used, overall unit cost, average efficiency, and so forth.
  

Accurate Variable Speed Pumping (VSP)

WaterCAD and WaterGEMS are based on the EPANet solver/engine, like most commercial software. The difference is that the solver has been highly improved within WaterCAD and WaterGEMS, so that Variable Speed Pumping (VSP) modeling is more accurate than in any other modeling software, giving operational results that you can trust.

WaterCAD/WaterGEMS provide the flexibility to model VSPs during past events where pump speed is known as well as to model case where pump speed is adjusted to maintain a head somewhere in the system. This allows users to mimic the behavior of VSPs in the field which is very difficult to achieve with other models.