The largest utility in Iceland serves over 70 % of the Icelandic population.
Hydraulic modeling in Veitur, the largest multi-utility in Iceland
“We get great value through understanding the impact of changes in the system, and thus making better decisions. Modeling should be an essential part of our daily operations.”
Iceland is known for its beautiful scenery and renewable energy sources. Still, with abundant natural resources, Iceland’s utilities struggle with problems similar to those elsewhere in the world. Deteriorating pipelines, focusing the investments most efficiently, 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 – Managing Director of Digital Transformation at Veitur OHF (later Veitur), the largest utility operating in Iceland.
About Veitur
Multi-utility Veitur supplies electricity, heat, water, and sewage services. It provides one or more utility services to over 70% of the Icelandic public, and manages over 9,000 kilometers of pipelines and cables. Veitur sources hot water from wells in low-temperature fields and distributes it to users, with additional hot water supplied by ON Power’s geothermal power plants.
Veitur strives to be as efficient as possible, with a minimal carbon footprint and a constant focus on the future, while serving its customers in the best possible way. Veitur has recognized that hydraulic modeling should be part of their daily operations going forward.
The Snowball Effect
Today, several years after the beginning of Fluidit and Veitur’s co-operation, she explains the current use of Fluidit software at Veitur: “There are three people doing modeling with Fluidit Heat and Fluidit Water at Veitur. But a larger and 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.
“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.”
She says one of her colleagues teaches district heating design at the University of Iceland. They were experiencing issues with outdated course content and enquired about using our software for teaching. As many of our professionals also teach part-time 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.
Ramping up the team’s expertise
Veitur has implemented the Fluidit software family to help plan and operate its network assets. Veitur looks to the future and sees that all relevant information and the best knowledge of utility systems should be in-house. Therefore, they are investing in ramping up their personnel’s modeling expertise and procuring software tools needed to understand how their distribution systems work.
“We at Veitur are thrilled that we started a collaboration with Fluidit in our journey towards model-based utility management.” Says Dr. Sigurðardóttir.
Dr. Sigurðardóttir explains that, in addition to the supportive role of modeling in daily planning and design, Veitur’s plans are much more ambitious. In the near future, the plan is to implement a digital twin and a live district heating model for the entire network service area. Another ongoing task is to explore and improve the system’s overall energy efficiency while meeting all customer requirements.
Conclusions
The fruitful co-operation has included intensive training of Veitur personnel and the development of Veitur utility models. While the basic modeling paradigms are the same in Iceland as in Finland, some specialized customization and developments are needed to best serve Icelandic customers. The team at Fluidit is eager to dig deeper into how utilities around the world operate and how our software offerings could better serve them.
