Now in its seventh year, the annual State of the Industry survey conducted by Pump Industry, has found that a tough year in 2019 and a slight slowdown in work in many sectors are making companies cautious for the year ahead. Ongoing factors are creating challenges, but opportunities are never far away for those who want to take hold of them.

Snowy 2.0 is a major pumped-hydro expansion of the existing Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, operated by Snowy Hydro Limited.  Construction of the original scheme started in 1949 and was completed in 1974. It now comprises nine power stations, housing 33 turbines with a total generating capacity of 4,100MW, one pumping station, one pumped storage facility, 16 major reservoirs, 145km of interconnected tunnels and 80km of aqueducts. 

When Unitywater formed in 2010, it inherited water and sewerage assets that had previously been operated and maintained by local councils. This presented a challenge for the utility – how would it optimise these assets to meet the needs of a thriving, growing region, and ensure its water and sewerage infrastructure could see them into the future?

A recent visitor to our facility described the lengthy process that entails when a power failure occurs and what that means to his utility’s water treatment plant operator. The operator has to quickly close fifteen motorised valves manually in order to prevent water overflowing onto the plant floor. The valves are usually controlled by a PLC, to control flow into a filtration backwash process, utilising venturi flowmeters.

In this case study from the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, DP Ag, a cotton farm in Moree replaced its old diesel guzzling irrigation system with a much more efficient and reliable solar-diesel hybrid that uses less than half the diesel of our old system. DP Ag Director, John Mulligan, talks about the project and the energy savings realised.

The moral of The Race Between the Hare and the Tortoise is that you can be more successful by doing things slowly and steadily than by acting quickly and without a clear understanding of the bigger picture. Here, we look at a simple pressurised force main waste treatment system. We will see that decreasing the flow rate through the system can save energy and reduce maintenance costs, while increasing system uptime.