LIVE & ONLINE CONFERENCE - 13 & 14 October 2026, London
Plus, Operationalising Smart Water Data To Help Target Demand Reduction
13 & 14 Oct 2026
Plus, Operationalising Smart Water Data To Help Target Demand Reduction
13 & 14 Oct 2026
Business water demand is becoming harder to forecast, harder to manage, and more uncertain in the places where it matters most.
AI data centres, advanced manufacturing, logistics hubs, public estates, and other high-growth industries are creating more concentrated and localised pressure, while traditional demand assumptions are no longer strong enough on their own.
At the same time, the non-household market is still working through the practical reality of smart metering for operational demand management: how to move beyond meter installation, data availability, and isolated leakage insight towards customer action, operational follow-through, and measurable reduction.
The challenge is that different parts of the market — and different teams inside utilities themselves — are often working from different data, motivations, and delivery pressures. Wholesalers, retailers, and major water users each see a different part of the picture, hold different accountabilities, and operate under different incentives, responsibilities, and commercial realities.
Utility resilience planning teams need stronger insight to understand where future demand pressure is emerging, which assumptions can still be trusted, and where water stress or infrastructure constraints are most exposed.
NHH smart metering leaders need a clearer view of the bigger resilience picture, so they can prioritise smart metering investment, target the highest-impact customer segments, and maximise the value of meter data beyond basic installation or leakage detection.
Wholesalers - as a whole segment - need stronger evidence to support resilience planning and investment decisions.
Retailers need customer engagement models that are practical enough to use, commercially realistic enough to scale, and credible enough to support targeted conversations with business users. As water resilience becomes more relevant to business continuity, "the market needs to move beyond broad partnership language and focus on the commercial mechanics of demand reduction: who acts, who benefits, what incentives are required, and how reductions are measured" (anonymised quote from our May/June 2026 industry consultation).
Major water users need clearer visibility of how consumption, leakage, wastage, process efficiency, and operational choices affect both their own costs and the wider regional water picture.
This initiative brings those perspectives together around the practical mechanics of making non-household demand reduction work in today's market.
The event is structured around that bridge between strategy and delivery.
Day One focuses on the strategic resilience challenge: improving forecasting, understanding large water user consumption patterns, testing growth assumptions, exploring market incentives, and clarifying how wholesalers, retailers, and customers can work together around future demand reduction.
It also examines where and how smart metering data fits into that journey — not as a fully solved answer, but as an increasingly important source of consumption evidence that can strengthen investment cases, sharpen regional targeting, and help the market move towards more dynamic forecasting over time.
Day Two moves into the operational reality of smart metering and non-household meter data: how to turn installations, data flows, alerts, retailer engagement, customer conversations, and follow-up actions into usable insight, measurable savings, and repeatable delivery.
Both days are connected by the same core objective — understanding demand more clearly and reducing it where it matters most — but each day has its own strategic vs. delivery focus and can be booked separately.
Individuals focused mainly on resilience planning, forecasting, and market coordination can prioritise Day One, while those more focused on the practical operationalisation of smart meter data can prioritise Day Two.
Together, the two days create a practical bridge between strategic resilience planning, measurable market action and smart meter data operationalisation for behavioural change.
Over the last several weeks, we have been engaging in research consultation and structured market feedback with water utilities, retailers, market participants, smart metering specialists, and major non-household water users.
Across those conversations, the same pressures came up again and again:
This is why the event is not a pure water resource planning event.
And it is not a pure smart metering event either.
It is about the practical bridge between the two.
Business water demand is becoming harder to forecast, harder to manage, and harder to reduce in the places where it matters most. At the same time, the market is still working through the reality of how to turn smart meter installation, data availability, alerts, dashboards, retailer engagement, and customer conversations into actual reductions in consumption.
That is the central challenge this event is designed to address:
How does the non-household market use better forecasting, better consumption insight, better retailer-customer engagement, and smarter operational delivery to reduce demand where it is genuinely achievable — without pretending the market is already more joined up than it really is?
That question sits at the centre of this year’s agenda, shaping sessions on future business demand, data centres and high-growth users, regional resilience, retailer-wholesaler incentives, smart metering delivery, data quality, continuous flow, customer engagement, benchmarking, and measurable savings.
Across two days of sessions, case studies, panels, roundtables, and peer exchange, the agenda is designed to help attendees understand:
This session will examine how utilities are currently forecasting future business demand, where historic assumptions are becoming weaker, and how economic growth, planning pipelines, smart meter data, retailer intelligence, and customer-side behaviour can be brought together more effectively.
The point is not to talk vaguely about “growth”. The point is to ask where demand is actually changing, which sectors are creating localised pressure, what data utilities can realistically access earlier, and how forecasts can become more useful before demand arrives.
Attendees will explore:
Data centres matter. They are visible, politically sensitive, locally concentrated, and often difficult to forecast with confidence.
But the event will not allow the data centre topic to swallow the wider business water demand conversation.
Sessions will explore the practical questions data centres raise around cooling models, ramp-up profiles, water-energy trade-offs, non-potable water options, planning timelines, local infrastructure constraints, and what developers should share with utilities earlier.
They will also cut through some of the conflicting media noise around data centre water use, including reports of moratoriums and planning restrictions in the US, and ask what the real lessons are for utilities, retailers, planners, and large users in the UK and Europe.
The bigger issue is not simply “data centres use water”.
You told us that the bigger issue is this:
How do water-stressed regions plan for concentrated demand growth when the users creating that demand may not yet know their final water profile, cooling strategy, operational ramp-up, or long-term resilience requirements?
Data centres are only one part of the picture.
The agenda will also examine how advanced manufacturing, life sciences, food and drink production, logistics hubs, healthcare estates, public-sector estates, campuses, and industrial clusters create demand patterns that are often more complicated than traditional sector forecasts suggest.
These users may have very different water profiles depending on production cycles, cleaning regimes, cooling requirements, process intensity, operating hours, expansion plans, and site-level efficiency opportunities.
Sessions will examine how utilities, retailers, and customers can better understand:
The market already knows that wholesalers and retailers need to work together more effectively.
The useful question is: what exactly has to change?
This part of the agenda moves beyond vague relationship language and focuses on the mechanics of delivery.
Sessions will ask:
This is where the event gets practical. Because if data does not move through the market in a usable way, and if retailers do not have a realistic model for acting on it, then smart metering value will remain limited.
Everyone knows in the UK water market that in demand reduction will not scale on goodwill alone.
This session will examine what would make demand reduction commercially viable for retailers, attractive to customers, and valuable for utility resilience planning.
Part of this requires a serious look at the incentives that could make action more realistic, including:
Sessions will discuss what kind of commercial and operational models are allowed and could be made to work, which would make demand reduction worth acting on for every part of the market.
Wholesalers and retailers understand that major water users do not all think about water in the same way. It was discussed a lot at the conference last year.
For some, water is mainly a cost issue. For others, it is a resilience issue, a production issue, a facilities issue, a compliance issue, a tenant issue, a clinical safety issue, or a business continuity issue.
Multiple sessions will examine what different customers actually care about, including:
The point is to make customer engagement more calibrated for specific sites.
A hospital campus, manufacturing plant, logistics estate, university, retail portfolio, and data centre do not all respond to the same message. If the market wants customers to act, it needs to understand what action looks like inside different organisations.
The research also showed that the smart metering conversation is changing.
The industry is no longer only asking whether meters can be deployed.
It is asking what happens after they are installed.
That is why Day Two focuses on the operational reality of smart metering and non-household meter data — not exclusively the data itself, but the retailer coordination, customer engagement, workflows, and follow-through needed to turn visibility into reduced avoidable consumption.
The focus will be on real implementation lessons:
Sessions all about turning visibility into action.
This session will look at the practical workflows required to act on data quickly, consistently, and commercially.
It will examine prioritisation, alert management, operational integration, escalation routes, issue ownership, retailer engagement, and how utilities and retailers decide which issues matter most.
Retailer-Wholesaler Operational Coordination
This session will focus on the operating model behind smart meter data.
It will explore how wholesalers and retailers coordinate around alerts, customer communication, data interpretation, issue validation, escalation, and follow-up.
The aim is to identify the practical workflows that allow smart meter data to become customer action rather than market noise.
Commercial leakage and continuous flow remain among the most immediate use cases for non-household smart metering.
Sessions will look at how continuous flow is identified, validated, prioritised, communicated, acted on, repaired, and measured. It will also explore how different property types affect interpretation, because continuous flow in one site may be leakage, while in another it may reflect legitimate operational use.
One of the big risks with smart metering is that it creates more visibility than teams can realistically respond to.
We aim to examine how utilities and retailers prioritise alerts by volume, duration, location, customer type, likely leakage value, water-stress relevance, operational risk, and probability of customer action.
This session will look at what actually makes business customers respond to water-use insight.
Attendees will explore which sectors engage most effectively, what messaging changes behaviour, how dashboards are used, what makes customers ignore alerts, and how engagement can be sustained beyond the first leak notification or usage report.
This is where the smart metering conversation becomes a customer behaviour conversation.
The event will also return to one of the strongest practical topics from last year: complex sites and difficult commercial properties.
This year, the focus moves further into solutions for operationalising smart meter data across sites such as:
These sites are difficult because usage patterns are not always obvious. Some operate 24/7. Some have shared supplies. Some have tenants. Some have process water. Some lack sub-metering. Some cannot isolate or repair quickly without operational disruption.
This session will explore how to interpret smart meter data properly in those environments — and how to turn it into realistic action.
How do NHH smart metering programmes demonstrate measurable value?
This session will examine how savings are calculated, how baselines are set, how leakage reductions are verified, how customer action is tracked, how ROI is communicated, and how investment cases are strengthened.
Day Two closes around a practical benchmarking roundtables, helping attendees compare where they are on the journey from meter installation to measurable demand reduction.
The aim is for attendees to leave with a clearer view of:
Together, the two days create a practical bridge between strategic resilience planning and measurable market action.
