Article updated: 14 July 2022
MOSL is pleased to announce the successful projects from the second round of the Market Improvement Fund (MIF).
The MIF offers individuals or groups up to £150k from a £1.5m fund for projects that improve the non-household market.
We received 13 bids in total, equating to over £1.4m in requested funding. All bids were reviewed for eligibility and scored by the independent Selection Committee and subsequently approved by the Strategic Panel. The Selection Committee has awarded £890k in total to nine successful bids.
Steve Formoy, MOSL's Director of Finance and project sponsor, says: "We continue to be delighted by the quality of the bids we're seeing submitted to the Market Improvement Fund. We're pleased to see so many projects tackling some of the biggest issues in the market, with several aiming to help the non-household market drive water efficiency benefits for customers. We look forward to following the successful applicants as their projects progress and sharing these updates with the market."
Find out more about the projects below:
RWG Wholesale Tariff Simplification Development
Applicant: Business Stream on behalf of the RWG
Sponsor: Thames Water
Following an industry-wide consultation to seek feedback on ideas to simplify wholesale tariffs, the RWG Tariff Simplification Sub-Group will be working with a consultant to explore and refine a number of options, where more technical expertise is required. These include simplifying and aligning volumetric tariff bands across wholesale regions; simplifying and aligning the bands for fixed meter charges; and aligning water and waste tariff bands.
Automated Water Efficiency Audits
Applicant and Sponsor: Wave Utilities
This project will use Internet of Things (IoT) technology (Water Event Metering) across a pilot of 250 customers, creating a low-cost way of decreasing average consumption in small commercial premises. It does this by providing the customer with consumption insight per outlet and creating business cases for them by using point of consumption data in real-time.
The primary output of the project is a blueprint for understanding of how smaller customers could engage in water efficiency measures, what works best and will enable MOSL members to use the best practice learnings to create new commercial propositions.
REDUCED – Raising Efforts to Drive User Consumption Efficaciously Down
Applicant: Isle Utilities
Sponsor: Wave Utilities
The REDUCED project will create a searchable online portal, giving retailers access to emerging technologies that will address customer pain-points, and verified technology developers access to retailers for trial opportunities. The portal will serve as a collaborative tool, enabling users to develop new skills and behaviours and further driving competition and the water efficiency profile of the non-household market.
Meter Condition Assessment
Applicant and Sponsor: Wave Utilities
Delivery Partner: OccuTrace Ltd.
This project will investigate 2,000 varied supply points (SPIDs) with zero-consuming meters (suspected to be broken) across all wholesalers to establish their state and provide a source of evidential data that outlines the extent to which manually read meters are contributing to the lack of accurate consumption data in the market.
Project ‘Discovery’ – NHH customer segmentation and consumption benchmarking
Applicant and sponsor: Anglian Water Services
Project ‘Discovery’ aims to better understand the potential contribution of the non-household water market to the wider demand challenges facing the industry and inform water resource management planning. It will look at testing the value of customer segmentation and consumption benchmarking in delivering demand reduction, which will result in the development of a national consumption benchmarking model that can be applied across the industry.
NAPS Data Quality Cleanse
Applicant: IDenteq Ltd
Sponsor: MOSL
IDenteq will target New and Partial supply points (NAPS), in an exercise to drive significant improvement to the quality of market data. The project will analyse NAPS to confirm which properties are genuine business connections, which are domestic and should be de-registered, and which connections have completed and should now be tradable in the market. Reports will be freely available to trading parties to help them cleanse any errors and improve overall data quality and create a template for trading parties to manage their own enduring processes to enable the data quality improvements to be maintained.
Consumption Awareness and Benchmarking. To utilise granular consumption data for improved market outcomes
Applicant: Yorkshire Water
Sponsor: MOSL
Delivery Partner: Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA)
This project aims to address the ongoing issue of how to make the best use of trading parties’ differing sets of granular consumption data for non-household customers by finding a way to actively share this data with the market operator. It will utilise granular trading party consumption data already collected via smart metering and data logging activity to create methodologies to assist the market and explore ways to accurately forecast non-household demand.
Business voids research to inform optimum market outcomes
Applicants and Sponsors: Yorkshire Water and Business Stream
Delivery Partner: Economic Insight
Yorkshire Water and Business Stream will lead a comprehensive review of reform options to lessen the number of premises that are incorrectly considered to be “void” properties in the non-household market. This project will seek to provide trading parties, MOSL and Ofwat with insight which will support decision making (including PR24 plans), ultimately leading to optimal delivery of customer outcomes including fair bills.
DEV-Pool - A new software service for Water Companies to fulfil service requests from Developers
Applicant: C&C Group Holdings
Sponsor: Portsmouth Water and Yorkshire Water
C&C Group aim to deliver a new central software solution “DEV-Pool” to enable developers to request water services from the various water companies in England and Wales and to allow an effective two-way communication channel for all stakeholders that would include non- household water wholesalers and retailers. This solution would serve both residential and commercial developer requests and would leverage C&C’s SWIM-Pool technology.
All awards are subject to terms and conditions, including regular review of progress and demonstratable benefit to the market and its customers.
We will be publishing a Market Improvement Fund special feature in July.
To keep up to date on the latest information for the next funding round, which is subject to Strategic Panel approval, please ensure you are signed up to receive our emails via the MOSL website.
For more information on the winners of the first round, click here.
If you have any questions, please contact
