UK: Skyports and Partners “Win Major Investment From Ofwat Innovation Fund, Breakthrough Challenge”
The fifth Water Breakthrough Challenge has awarded more than UKP42 million to 16 innovation projects solving major challenges in the water sector, including a project comprising of Skyports, Northumbrian Water, Makutu, Newcastle University and Proteus Instruments, reports a press release.
Under the title ‘Major Smart Skies, Healthy Waters’ the group was named a winner. The release says, “Smart Skies, Healthy Waters, a world-first innovation that uses automated drones and real-time data analytics to monitor water quality has been named a winner of the fifth Water Breakthrough Challenge by the Ofwat Innovation Fund, also being a headline winning project for the challenge.”
Over a 10 year period, the Ofwat Innovation Fund is investing UKP600 million in innovative projects and technologies to benefit the environment, society and customers.
Richard Warneford, Head of Wastewater at Northumbrian Water, commented, “This project provides a ground-breaking opportunity to harness new technologies to enable more frequent monitoring of our bathing waters. It will be a world-first and a step change for our sector, helping to ensure healthier waters for our customers, communities and our environment.”
The release continues, “Current manual water quality monitoring methods are labour-intensive, infrequent and, when carried out at sea, carry safety risks. With limited alternative methods that are difficult to scale, Smart Skies Healthy Waters offers a world-first solution that will transform how the water sector can manage resources, respond to risk, and serve communities.”
James Sumsion, CEO of Makutu, remarked, “Smart Skies Healthy Waters is a powerful example of how innovative thinking can tackle real-world challenges, in this case, bringing real-time coastal water quality data directly to the public. This funding marks a major milestone, enabling us to scale our impact — not just across the UK, but globally — delivering high-quality, actionable data exactly when and where it’s needed.”
The solution works by combining automated drones, advanced sensors and cloud-based analytics, to deliver data directly to water companies and the general public, providing vital insights into the health of coastal waters.
Samples will be analysed close to the site at “lab in a box” locations, providing results in near real-time. This data will then be made public, empowering visitors to the coastal sites with information on the quality of the water. This tech driven approach will transform how the water sector can manage resources, respond to risk and serve communities.
Alex Brown, Director of Drone Services, Skyports, said, “Monitoring and improving the UK’s water quality is important to all of us. With drones we can reach further, more frequently and provide better insights compared to the normal way of collecting water samples.”
He continued, “We started working with Northumbria Water and Makutu two years ago with our first water monitoring service, and this is the latest milestone to take this service to the next step. In the future we see a large network of water monitoring drones flying BVLOS around key water sites in the UK, providing instant insights back to Northumbrian Water, as well as other utilities, allowing them to take action where required to keep our waterways clean.”
Alex Brown
Makutu brings expertise in cloud data platforms, AI and IoT, associated with enterprise-scale digital transformation, to the heart of the UK’s environmental challenge.
David Black, CEO of Ofwat stated, “The level of ambition of this year’s winners is remarkable. We are supporting these projects to prove their impact so that they can be scaled, not only here in England and Wales, but exported around the world as a driver of economic growth.”
To find out more about this year’s 16 winners or to discover previous winners, click on: waterinnovation.challenges.org .
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(Images: Skyports Drone Services)
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