Why Your Utility Should Consider Joining The Conversation

For utilities/wholesalers, the non-household water conversation is becoming more strategically important — and harder to manage in practice.

You are being asked to strengthen resilience, reduce demand, support growth, improve forecasting, justify investment, and show measurable progress. But you are doing that in a market where the customer relationship is split, retailer incentives vary, customer maturity is uneven, and some of the biggest future demand pressures are still only partly visible.

That is why this event has been designed to bring the strategic and operational pieces into the same room.

Day One: Future Demand, Resilience Planning & Market Coordination

Day One focuses on the strategic challenge: how do utilities improve confidence in future non-household demand when historic assumptions are no longer enough?

The agenda will examine demand from data centres, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, food production, public estates, campuses, industrial parks, and other high-consumption users — not as a generic growth story, but as a practical forecasting and resilience problem.

The key questions are:

• Where is demand actually growing?
• Which future demand is real, and which is still speculative?
• What information should large users share earlier?
• How do cooling choices, production cycles, operating hours, and estate expansion change water demand?
• How should local water stress influence customer targeting and investment priorities?
• Where can demand-side action reduce resilience risk before reinforcement or new supply becomes the only answer?

The value of Day One is not a magic new forecasting model.

It is a more honest discussion about how utilities combine planning data, sector intelligence, customer insight, retailer input, smart meter trends, and local resilience priorities — while recognising the limits of each.

Smart meter data may become an important part of that picture over time. But the event will not pretend most programmes are already mature enough to fully reshape resource planning. The better question is: where can smart data improve confidence now, and where does the market still need better evidence, better processes, and earlier customer engagement?

Day Two: Turning Smart Meter Visibility Into Measurable Reduction

Day Two moves into operational delivery.

The research was clear: the market is moving from meter deployment into operational maturity. Installing meters and sharing data is not the end of the job. In many cases, it is where the harder work starts.

Day Two will focus on the practical mechanics:

• How do we turn meter data into usable insight?
• How do we prioritise alerts without overwhelming teams?
• How do we separate continuous flow, leakage, wastage, abnormal use, and legitimate operational demand?
• What does the retailer need in order to act?
• Who owns the customer conversation?
• How are savings verified?
• Which KPIs matter beyond meter coverage and data availability?
• How do we prove smart metering is reducing avoidable consumption, not just improving visibility?

What Utilities Should Expect To Take Away

Utilities and wholesalers should leave with a sharper view of:

• Where future business demand is hardest to forecast
• Which high-growth sectors need earlier engagement
• How peers are approaching data centres without  making the whole debate about data centres
• How smart meter data can be used cautiously but usefully within wider resilience intelligence
• What retailers need in order to turn insight into customer action
• Which incentive and workflow models could make demand reduction more realistic
• How to prioritise customers, zones, and sectors where reduction could matter most
• How to move from deployment metrics to measurable reduction outcomes

The event will not pretend that the market has already solved the connection between resilience planning, smart meter data, retailer action, and customer behaviour.

It will do something more useful.

It will bring the right people into one room to work through the mechanics: what is known, what is still uncertain, what can be tested now, what needs better coordination, and where utilities can start building a more credible bridge between strategic resilience planning and measurable non-household demand reduction.