By Chris Toop

WHEN filling the kettle or running a bath, few of us spend much time thinking about what it takes behind the scenes to get water into our home. Living in water-rich Scotland, you are likely to expect that, when turning on taps or flushing a toilet, a reliable supply of high quality water will instantly appear.

Generally speaking, you would be right. The standard of water through customers’ taps has never been higher and, as part of our new £3.5 billion investment programme, Scottish Water is determined to make it even better.

But providing a consistently high standard of water to all our customers is a huge challenge, requiring a significant amount of energy.

Every day, Scottish Water provides our customers with a massive 1.34 billion litres of drinking water. It is collected from supply sources such as reservoirs and then treated at one of around 250 water treatment works. The water is then pumped to our customers through a network of almost 30,000 miles of pipes.

After use, we collect 847 million litres of waste water every day, which travels through sewer pipes for further intensive treatment at one of our 1,800 waste water treatment works, before it is returned safely to the environment.

This means we currently need around 440GWh of electricity annually. To put that into context, that’s estimated to be more energy than is used by every household combined in Aberdeen.

And energy, as any consumer will know, represents a significant outgoing. Scottish Water has therefore been working to reduce the amount of energy that we need to purchase.

In the last two years we have doubled the amount of renewable energy that can be generated at our treatment works and in our water mains to over 50GWh

We have 27 hydro turbines that harness the natural flow of water through our pipes to produce electricity, while 18 small-scale wind turbines and 16 photovoltaic schemes have been installed within our sites.

This means that several of our treatment works can be considered self-sufficient in that they generate more energy than they consume.

The world’s first "Difgen" hydro turbine – which is used to control water pressure while simultaneously generating electricity – was installed in a main near Denny, while our food waste recycling plant near Cumbernauld was the first large-scale plant of its kind in Scotland, helping to prevent the release of greenhouse gases from landfill.

We can also generate energy from sewage sludge, reducing transport of materials off-site and increasing the environmental sustainability of our operations. And this year we also aim to be the first UK utility to extract heat from sewage, benefitting a college campus close to a waste water treatment works in the Borders.

This innovative approach has the potential to be replicated at other sites in Scotland, offering environmental and heating cost benefits. We have also installed more than 4,000 smart meters to measure consumption and target opportunities to use less energy. We are also exploring and long-term low energy treatment solutions.

This has all helped to reduce base electricity consumption by more than five per cent in the last five years, while our carbon emissions have fallen by 18 per cent since 2006/07.

It’s good news for the environment and a great way of maximising economic benefit from our water resources, in the spirit of the Scottish Government’s Hydro Nation agenda.

But, crucially, it’s fantastic news for our customers. Our average household charge is £39 lower than the average household charge for water and waste water services in the UK. Our customers expect us to keep costs low and so, in the next six years, we have pledged to keep our overall customer charges below inflation.

With the diversity of our renewable programme, we estimate that, whatever the weather, our energy programme is already saving customers over £6m a year. But we have ambitions to do even more.

As we look to the future with the aim of delivering even better customer service, our energy programme is one of the most important ways of keeping costs low.

It will mean that all our customers, from Stranraer to Shetland, can turn on their taps to an even higher quality of "greener" water.

Chris Toop is the General Manager for Scottish Water’s energy programme