How Nevers Agglomeration gained
20% efficiency on its water network

Testimonial

Dominique DERANGERE
Head of the Water and Sanitation Department - Nevers Agglomeration

Fabrice PACCAMICCIO
Manager of the Water Department - Nevers Agglomeration

• Can you tell us about the many performance points you have achieved?

  

  D.D. :

  Yields in 2014 were clearly insufficient and did not reach the thresholds necessary to qualify for subsidies from the Water Agency. They were just above the yields decreed by the Grenelle law. From 74%, thanks to the network and remote management, the network yield obtained in 2020 will exceed 94%.

• You have deployed many local stations and SOFREL data loggers on your facilities. What do they bring to the control room teams?

  

  F.P. :

  At present, we make full use of the SOFREL S500 and S4W local stations for data acquisition, reporting to supervision, alarm reporting, inter-site communications, etc. We use the automation functions for automatic pump switching, frequency and pressure variation. The S4W in particular responds to cybersecurity issues. It allows us to communicate entirely in IP in a secure way and to give access to authorized persons.

  The SOFREL LS allows us to follow daily what is happening on the water distribution network, to archive information and to see the evolution of the flow through the meters.
  The strong points of SOFREL products are to be able to connect everything, to automate everything… the only limitations of the products are in fact those that we inject ourselves with our lack of skills or imagination.

• Keeping a close eye on water consumption is an essential point for the department.

  

  D.D. :

  The interest of all this telemetry is to bring a better service to our subscribers, in particular the “big consumers”. For example, the USON rugby stadium, soccer stadiums, schools, retirement homes, etc., where water supply problems and consumption control are really important. By managing to sectorize, to follow and to remotely monitor our networks, we are able, if not to anticipate, at least to react very quickly in case of consumption drifts.

• You have called upon the LACROIX LAB to cross-reference various data in order to have a better understanding of the network. Can you explain what this adds to your supervision?

  

  F.P. :

  Daily we have 5,000 pieces of data that are sent to our servers. They are managed through the PCWin2 supervision software installed in our control room. This full web solution allows us to query the supervision from our PCs in intranet but also through our cell phones and tablets in IP communication via the VPN we have installed.

  At the moment PCWin2 is very efficient for our control room needs. Nevertheless we wanted to push a little further the exploitation of the data bycrossing the remote management data with other databases such as the cartography of our GIS and the billing data. To do this we called on the LACROIX LAB. From this partnership, an application was born that allows us to share data and image it to make it more accessible to the control room agents. It allows us to be more reactive in the field, to analyze data in real time, to quickly rule out data anomalies or then to target leaks on the network.

• What are the savings made thanks to remote management?

  

  D.D. :

  It’s been estimated that since 2014 productivity gains in yields have caused us to save 200,000 m3 of water each year. Right now, given climate change that’s something we’re particularly proud of. These results encourage us to continue over time.
  From a financial point of view, if we take into account all the water we did not have to produce unnecessarily it is also 130 MW that is saved thanks to this remote monitoring.