BRADFORD-based utility Yorkshire Water is to invest £46 million renewing and upgrading technology used to control water distribution, quality and treatment throughout the region.

The investment will include the replacement of critical control systems that remotely manage Yorkshire's water infrastructure - such as the firm's 600 waste water treatment works, 130 reservoirs and numerous storm water pumping stations.

The investment programme will be spread over the next five years and will help Yorkshire Water meet its core business objective of protecting the natural environment and ensuring a consistent supply of safe and clean water for its five million customers.

Nearly half of the money, £21 million, will be spent on updating around 2,000 instruments that are used to measure water quality and control water flow to ensure regulatory standards are met.

A further £18 million will be spent on communication systems which relay key performance information from across its operations to the company’s head office in Bradford. A further £7million will be spent on site automation systems that run its water treatment and distribution processes.

Stephen Herndlhofer, Yorkshire Water's head of information services, said: “We supply 1.2 billion litres of water and treat nearly one billion litres of waste water each and every day.

"To ensure our assets and infrastructure continue to meet this demand, we monitor them every minute of every day, employing modern and reliable control systems. This requires an ongoing programme of upgrade and replacement to meet ever more stringent environmental and water quality standards.

“By upgrading our telemetry equipment, it also reduces the risk of service failure by targeting maintenance and responding to failures before customers are affected. In turn, this helps us reduce operational costs and keep customers’ bills as low as possible.”

Yorkshire Water will work with its telemetry partners, Grontmij and Capula, as well as other approved suppliers to replace and update its telemetry equipment.

Since 2000, Yorkshire Water has more than tripled its annual investment in telemetry.

The latest investment follows £33 million spent on upgrading a plant at Esholt water treatment works in Bradford which turns ‘poo into power’.

It was part of a £56million investment programme which helped to increase Yorkshire Water’s renewable energy generation by nearly 80 per cent.

The BioThelys Sludge Treatment Plant converts sewage into enough electricity to make more than three billion cups of tea, reduce the company's carbon footprint by nearly 15,000 tonnes and also reduce the cost of powering its sites around the region. T