Manufacturing and Engineering Magazine Volume 420 - September 2015 | Page 22

hydro.qxp_feature 2 06/08/2015 12:35 Page 20

MANUFACTURING & ENGINEERING HYDRO INDUSTRIES
Wayne Preece, CEO of Hydro Industries,
commented: “Hydro Industries was formed
just over four years ago when I was working in
the defence industry. We were looking for solutions to water problems on the front line and
found a raw and basic form of technology, I
thought that it could be taken somewhere if it
had the right backing and resources behind it.
“Over the next two or three years we
worked hard to create a product that we could
take to market and a company that had credibility behind it. The original product is electro
chemistry-based technology, this is a very
green form of treating water, which helps to
reduce the use of chemicals when treating
large amounts water.
“Our first plan was to create a British success story from an innovative global water
technology company. We also wanted to be
regarded as a market leader with strong green
credentials. We have a list of capabilities that
apply to our product. This includes drinking
water and waste water management, oil separation and recovery, issues around water in the
mining industry, environmental management

“Intelligent Energy are
a very successful
organisation and we’ve
collaborated with them
based on their work in
India”

20

and also mineral and metal recovery.”
In March 2014, Hydro Industries
announced a collaboration with Intelligent
Energy to support the commercialisation of
Hydro’s water purification technology across
India. As India has one of the world’s fastest
growing economies, it is expected that there
will be a 40% rise in the need for water over the
next decade. The collaboration with Intelligent
Energy aims to provide accessible, clean drinking water to regions in need. The technology
developed in Wales will be administered to
help communities all across India.
Wayne enthused: “Intelligent Energy are a

MANUFACTURING AND ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

very successful organisation and we’ve collaborated with them based on their work in India
where they are looking to work in power distribution management for Telecom companies.
The company has already won thousands of
masts to handle the power distribution across
India. We were then approached to see if we
could turn excess energy into clean drinking
water for the local populations. We redesigned
our system and made it smaller and we found
that we could make around 50-80,000 litres of
clean drinking water a day. Around the masts in
which the energy comes from there are often
populations or communities, so it is a huge ben-