Fast tracking steps to achieve pressing carbon and climate change goals.
Anglian Water, Essex & Suffolk Water and Yorkshire Water introduce Innovate East 2021, a series of virtual events held throughout the year focused on carbon and climate change.
Built on the same ethos as the inaugural 2019 event, we are inviting some of the greatest thinkers out there to join us across the year to create three or more game changing projects.
Once again, we’ll be using sprint methodology to quickly and logically work through our problem statements to unearth new thinking and ideas that will benefit our industry, our regions and wider society. We will share the learnings and outcomes to facilitate change across sectors, industries and countries.
How can you get Involved?
The first and second Innovate East events of 2021 took place on 24-25 March and 9-10 June.
Innovate East returns for the finale event over Wednesday 29 and Thursday 30 September. Our teams of inspired explorers from different industries, locations and backgrounds will once again join together to make the final steps towards defining project proposals that will provide a platform for the water industry and beyond to reach net zero carbon.
We’ll be picking up where we left off after our second event in June through our three guiding themes of hydrogen, technology and nature-based solutions. So far each sprint has spent time exploring the subject, stripping it back to discover and define a key direction of travel, and of course, generating the all-important ideas that will catapult us towards real outcomes. Following reflection after this event, the direction of some of these sprints have been refined and the focus for the final event in September can be found below.
Hydrogen-based solutions sprint
In the third and final hydrogen sprint this group will be pulling together high level objectives, key deciding issues and stakeholders to help agree a structure and consortium to write a business case and funding bids to help meet the challenge of:
• Matching fleet replacement cycles to available technology
• Ensuring right fleet and infrastructure is developed at the right time
• Ability to ensure charging regimes, grid infrastructure and refuelling points are optimised.
The output will be to build a platform using real world data to allow decision making to be made at speed and scale in relation to both electric vehicles and other low carbon options such as hydrogen for larger vehicles.
The solution will be developed in collaboration with the water sector, data and modelling experts, vehicle solution experts and other companies with large logistics fleets.
The project will deliver a data platform and dashboard to allow the support good decision making in line with the challenges.
Technology-based solutions sprint
In the second event in June, this group brought together the Innovate East community to explore ideas around using waste heat from the water network to provide low carbon heating solutions in more detail. They discovered that there are various forms of this technology being applied in the UK at the moment, however uptake is low, despite the large scale opportunity for the delivery of low carbon heat, together they reviewed the merits of using these technologies.
In the third event the group will explore the barriers to uptake and seek to develop some next steps for the greater adoption of the use of waste heat from the water sector.
Nature-based solutions sprint
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are an increasingly important component of water company business plans. It is expected that many more NBS will be proposed for AMP8 than for AMP7, in part because of their ability to deliver solutions that address the climate and biodiversity crisis.
To support an increase in the number of NBSs being applied across the water industry, how might we build greater confidence by increasing our understanding of the associated risks and working together to reduce uncertainty in order to improve the environment for NBS investment decision making.
Who can take part?
Anyone is welcome to take part in Innovate East. No matter your background, experience or previous attendance, we believe everyone has something to add to solving the very huge challenges we face when it comes to carbon and climate change. You don’t need to be in the water industry to take part – we want diversity above all. If we had the answers as an industry alone, events like Innovate East wouldn’t take place. We know the key to success lies in working together and that’s why we want to attract as many people as possible who think differently.
Carbon reduction and climate change is one of the most important issues facing us in this lifetime. It’s everyone’s responsibility to help solve it. You can help be part of the change, and the steps toward the solution, by bringing your perspective to Innovate East.
Sign up here
Registration for the opening and closing sessions at our autumn finale event on Wednesday 29 and Thursday 30 September is now open. You can sign up via Hopin here.
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Strength in numbers... Yorkshire Water joins the fold
Innovate East 2021 signals the beginning of a strengthened approach as Yorkshire Water joins with Anglian Water and Essex and Suffolk Water to focus on climate change and carbons goals. All three companies acknowledge that the challenges ahead of us are huge and that we must be open, innovative and forward thinking to enhance our chances of meeting these.
The organisations are joint sponsors of the Public Interest Commitment to achieve net zero carbon emissions for the sector by 2030. This has cemented the union and a route map to reach this goal was launched on Thursday 12 November. You can read more about this below.
Get in touch
If you have any questions about this year’s events, please get in touch via the form below.
Innovate East 2019
Our inaugural event saw over 2000 guests from almost 300 organisations across the globe join forces to find solutions focused on digital twins, leakage, natural capital and social purpose.
Thank you to everyone who came to the 2019 event and brought their knowledge, energy, ideas and perspective. We saw some incredible ideas start their journeys here and awarded seed funding from a £100,000 commitment from Anglian Water and Essex & Suffolk Water.
Our teams have been working on progressing these ideas from their original concepts since the event. Click on the ideas below to find out more about their background and where they are today.
Learn More
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VIDEOS
EVENT TWO: JUNE 2021
EVENT ONE: MARCH 2021
INNOVATE EAST 2021
