volume 1 - Halifax Regional Municipality

Halifax Water Integrated Resource Plan
Appendices
• Halifax Water continues to promote water conservation, as it is a sustainable
practice that will benefit the utility, customers, and the environment in the long run.
The promotion of water conservation is carried out through direct education and
partnerships with HRM and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
These programs have all been included in the IRP through the Five-Year Capital Plan or
additional expenditure recommended under the IRP.
2. NEW PROGRAMS
2.1 ENHANCED ASSET RENEWAL PROGRAM
As was noted above, Halifax Water is presently in the process of implementing the AMA.
Once complete it will have the necessary framework and data for developing and
managing the asset renewal program.
In the interim, the present IRP needed a methodology to assess the capital needs of
asset renewal for all infrastructure systems. The IRP Enhanced Asset Renewal Program
evaluation was conducted in two steps:
• Initially, three uniform levels (all assets and all infrastructure systems) of asset
renewal, labeled A, B and C, were considered for all point and linear assets.
• The second step involved developing a composite program where the program level
was determined for each asset individually using a failure risk assessment. This was
labeled the composite program and was used in the formulation of the later refined
and short-listed alternative resource plans.
The result of the first stage of the asset renewal modeling is shown in Table 2.1 for the
water system assets. The table presents the renewal rates and estimated 30-year net
present value (NPV) for the A, B, and C asset renewal variations of the water system
assets.
The table data was generated using a proprietary asset renewal model. Details of the
modeling procedure are presented in Volume 3 Appendix E.
The asset renewal model evaluated the age of every asset at every model time step and
then compared this age with service life of the asset. If the age in the time step
exceeded the service life of the asset, the asset was replaced. Ideally, replacement
decisions should be based on asset condition information not just on service life alone.
In actuality, an asset management program would employ a range of interventions from
repair through rehabilitation to extend asset service life rather than always replacing
assets at their service life limits. However, given the limitations of available asset data
(see Section 3); service life was used as a reasonable surrogate.
Revision: 2012-10-29 Integrated Resource Plan –Appendices F-7
October 31 2012 Page 186 of 272