Iceland is the land of beautiful scenery and renewable energy sources. Still with the abundant natural resources – utilities in Iceland struggle with similar problems as the utilities in the rest of the world. Deteriorating pipelines, focusing the investments in the most efficient manner, designing new pipelines, and gaining an understanding of the overall performance of their systems. We’ve had the delight of discussing the use of Fluidit software with Dr. Sigríður Sigurðardóttir – Head of Digital Development at Veitur, the largest utility operating in Iceland.
Multi-utility Veitur OHF supplies electricity, heat, water, and sewage services. It provides one or more utility services to over 70% of the Icelandic public. They have over 9000 kilometers of pipeline and cables. Veitur provides hot water from wells in low-temperature fields and distributes that, and hot water from ON Power’s geothermal power plants, to users. Veitur strives to be as efficient as possible with minimal possible carbon footprint and constant outlook to the future and serving their customers the best possible way. Veitur has seen that hydraulic modeling should be part of their daily operations in the future.
“It is clear that Fluidit is customer-centric with their excellent communication, passion for our success, continued product improvements, and responsiveness to our questions and suggestions.”
Dr. Sigríður Sigurðardóttir – Head of Digital Development
Today three years from the beginning of Fluidit and Veitur co-operation, she explains the current usage of Fluidit software at Veitur. “There are three people doing modeling with Fluidit Heat and Fluidit Water at Veitur. A much larger group of people is interested in the results of modeling.” The successful implementation with Veitur has spread the use of Fluidit software to one consultancy office and to the University of Iceland.
“Co-operation with Fluidit has been a highlight of this journey. From our early adoption of their product, we have maintained a professional and personal relationship with their project managers, customer service employees, and founders that gets better every day.” Dr. Sigurðardóttir says.
She says that one of her colleagues is teaching district heating design at the University of Iceland. They were having problems with outdated course content and enquired whether they could use our software for teaching purposes. As many professionals from our company are also doing part-time lecturing at universities, we were happy to provide our software for teaching purposes.
“It is clear that Fluidit is customer-centric with their excellent communication, passion for our success, continued product improvements, and responsiveness to our questions and suggestions.” Dr. Sigurðardóttir continues.
Veitur operating area in Iceland. Picture source (www.veitur.is) referred March 2022.
“We at Veitur are very happy that we started a collaboration with Fluidit in our journey towards model-based utility management.” Says Dr. Sigurðardóttir.
Veitur has implemented Fluidit software family to help plan and operate their network assets. Veitur has a broad look into the future where they see that all the relevant information and the best knowledge of utility systems should be in-house. Therefore, they are investing in ramping up the modeling expertise for their personnel and procuring software tools needed for understanding how their distribution systems work. Dr. Sigurðardóttir explains that besides the supportive role of modeling in daily planning and design business, the plans for Veitur are much more ambitious. In the near future, the plan is to implement a digital twin and live district heating model of the whole network service area. Another continuous task is to explore and enhance the overall energy efficiency of the system while catering to all the demands of customers.
The fruitful co-operation has included intensive training of Veitur personnel and building up the models of Veitur utility. While the basic modeling paradigms are the same in Iceland as they are in Finland, there are some special customizations and development that need to take place in order to serve this unique Icelandic customer the best way possible. And we at Fluidit are more than happy to dig deeper into understanding how the utilities all around the world work and how our software offerings could serve them better.
If you are interested in modeling your water distribution read more info here. If you are working with district energy networks read more on the benefits of Fluidit Heat here.