There are several bullets that can potentially be bitten in the process of making sure that the supply and demand for urban water meet, and none of them are particularly pleasant for state governments. But the particular bullets that have been bitten have varied somewhat from state to state. In a nutshell, the bullets are:
- the perceived ickiness of drinking water that’s been through other people’s digestive systems – in a nutshell, the pooh factor.
- the energy usage, and potential brine disposal problems of desalination
- the screams from the farming sector if water is taken from river systems currently exploited for irrigation, particularly the Murray-Darling
- whatever technological fix is adopted, the cost of water will go up, and the best way to recover that cost is user-pays (with possible compensation for low-income earners)
No state government has been prepared to tackle more than a couple of these at once, and it’s differed from state to state. Queensland, uniquely, has been prepared to go with recycled water. Sydney seems to have settled on desalination, combined with more expensive renewable energy, with the attendant cost increases.
Victoria’s new water plan has been out for a little while now, after a steady buildup of pressure for actual projects to be publicly announced, and Bracks has upped the ante a little bit by tackling three out of the four. In a nutshell, there are two simultaneous projects proposed:
- a massive desalination plant located at Wonthaggi, a town to Melbourne’s south-east which is, importantly, next to Bass Strait rather than Port Philip or Westernport bays. This will provide 150 gigalitres of water per year, upgradeable to 200.
- a whole bunch of savings (225 GL per year) from irrigation schemes in the Murray-Darling by piping channels and whatnot; the water is to be split equally between environmental flows, new allocations available for agriculture, and – the bullet-biting bit – a pipeline to pump 75 gigaliters of water per year from the Goulburn River over the Great Divide to Melbourne.
There’s lots of technical information to digest about the plan, particularly the studies of the chosen desalination plant and the not-adopted stormwater recycling project (the numbers on which didn’t stack up, according to the feasibility study). Suffice to say that the plant location chosen, and the decision to power it with renewable energy, is not cheap but should should avoid any serious environmental issues. Notably, the ocean outfall should avoid too many problems with the hypersaline brine output having too much effect on marine life. But the particular mix of projects chosen doesn’t seem to make all that much sense. Setting aside for the moment whether a one-third expansion in Melbourne’s water supply is really called for so quickly – not to mention whether recycling sewage into drinking water would have been cheaper – it seems neither project’s potential is being exploited to its fullest extent.
In the case of the desalination plant, the outfalls and pipeline back to the Melbourne water supply system are designed for a capacity of 200 GL per year. But the plant is only being built to a capacity of 150 GL per year. If the full capacity of 200GL was constructed immediately, that would render the Goulburn pipeline redundant, would avoid arguments with farmers, and the overall capital cost would probably be lower.
But seeing the government’s decided to bullet-bite and take water out of the Murray-Goulburn system, it seems to me that they could have easily obtained enough to meet Melbourne’s additional needs. From what I’ve been able to glean, there’s more than sufficient flow in the Goulburn available; it’s just a question of who you buy the rights off and whether the piping is cost-efficient. But given the government’s plan to scrape up an extra 225 GL of usable water annually by reducing wastage, rather than making an extra 75 GL available for irrigation, they could easily pump that to Melbourne, giving a total of 150 GL/year extra water for Melbourne. But the 225 GL doesn’t represent the total level of wastage reduction available, even ignoring the possibility of buying water off irrigators. The government could almost certainly get the required amount of water entirely from the Goulburn. The bigger pipeline would cost more, but cost per unit of water delivered would be lower.
The farmers will scream and yell, but they’re already screaming and yelling despite them getting more water than they get now. They want all Melburnians to install water tanks as educational devices to learn the “value of water”. If irrigators want to learn the bloody value of water, they can pay urban consumer prices for it…
There may be other costs relating to the distribution of water within Melbourne that makes two separate projects, delivering water to two separate parts of the city, worthwhile. But they aren’t apparent from the information released yet, which makes it all the more puzzling why the government has bothered to stir up the hornet’s nest of buying rural water for urban purposes and gone with a desalination project as well.
At this point, the local media have restricted their criticism to complaints about the taxpayer-funded ad campaign to sell the policy. Perhaps they might also start asking about the merits or otherwise of the policy itself.
Though some of my friends are engineers, (& not that there’s anything wrong with that) I am times tempted to reach for the big bit of 4′ x 2′. Especially as regards water & infrastructure.
Stormwater use – OK so its too difficult to manage as large reserves in urban areas. But what the hell is wrong with say the example at UNSW where by redeveloping their ovals, practice fields etc, water retention pits have replaced mains water completely & indeed offer water for other uses. No recreational space should be wasting a drop of mains water. Small scale storm water usage works.
And why do we persist in not recognising that the ONLY tap in a domestic house that should have clean mains water coming out of it is the one in the kitchen? Privatising water supply at drinking quality is insane, but privatising recycled water? Go for it. Let the market raise the capital for the required infrastucture, let the market value add, let the market develop its user base. Let the market develop a parallel supply structure, particularly aimed at industry & ag use in the first instance.
& lastly, no, domestic water tanks aren’t going to save the planet BUT they significantly change peoples’ understanding of water availability & usage. I’m with Pavlov’s Cat on this – its called personal responsibility. Culture change is vitally important – publicly funded big engineering “solutions” of dubious benefit & profitability are dumb dumb dumb.
Why not just stop logging in water catchments?
Considering the Thomson catchment, which supplies over 50% of Melbourne’s water during drought years:
Over 50% of the Thomson catchment has now been logged.
The area most heavily logged produces 70% of the water.
This is causing the loss of 20 gigalitres of water each year from the catchment, which amounts to the water used by about 100,000 households.
The value of the water lost subsequent to logging far exceeds the low value of the woodchips, timber and royalties. Victorians would be $147m better off per year if logging of catchments stopped.
Melbourne Water should buy out the timber licenses for the Thomson and Yarra tributary catchments at an estimated cost of $3.9 million, rather than spend the estimated $20 million to bring the Tarago catchment back into the domestic water supply system.
If the Bracks government were to stop logging our native forest, adopt further conservation measures and encourage every household to use a water tank, we may not even need the $4 billion desalination plant which will double the cost of water bills.
The UK Stern Report estimates that deforestation represents more than 18% of global carbon emissions, so protecting protecting our forests from logging has the added benefit of ensuring the carbon they store stays there and does not further contribute to climate change.
So why does Steve Bracks keep logging our water catchments?
<TIC> You can’t have people en-mass having their own water supply.. How else is the Bracks government going to pay for all these shiny new desalination/recycling plants? </TIC>
I had a good laugh at the cartoon in The Age today: [link]
I agree that each household should have at a minimum a rainwater tank, and greywater recycling (to power the loo and water the gardens). The mains water should only be used for drinking/cooking water.
Robert, surely you have forgotten the other bullet in your nutshell summary. Dams.
User pays, with rebates. Perpetual financial motion at work.
hear hear. (or is that here here)
And I’d send ‘em a bill for the last 50 years worth too.
I grew up with tanks and dams. Plenty in winter when you don’t need it. Fuck all in summer when you do. (Did I tell you about the time my pet cocky drowned in the house tank? …well……)
I’d be willing to bet $100 at about evens that we’ll see a few floods like Gippsland today in catchment areas and that within 3 years we will have 100% full catchment.
The climatologists have been telling us that the weather systems have moved south. There seems no reason why they should move north again. So I’m willing to bet that over the next 30 years the rain in southeastern Australia won’t perform at the 20C average.
(I’m willing to bet even more that I won’t be alive to collect.)
Robert, Brisbane has taken a three-fold approach. Recycling, desalination and more dams. I think it’s not going to rain as much here either. If I were Beattie I’d be planning a second desal plant.
I know rainwater tanks are an expensive way to go, but the water is there. The Brisbane City Council will only subsidise them now if they are plumbed into the house, and have increased the subsidy to make that easier.
I’m surprised that some commenters don’t want potable water in the bathroom basin.
I don’t have a specific view on logging in the Thomson catchment except to note that, as a rule, I like forests left alone. That said, even taking that 20 GL annual figure as gospel, it’s only a small fraction of the water we need. Furthermore, it’s not like the land is left cleared in the Thomson catchment (or anywhere else that’s logged in Oz). So it’s probably a bit unfair to equate logging in the Thomson with deforestation. The loss of biodiversity and other issues might well be serious, but there are going to be trees there again after the logging.
Bernice, might I suggest that sometimes engineers know what they’re talking about when it comes to engineering problems. When they say that desalination is environmentally acceptable and a cheaper option than stormwater recycling or rainwater tanks, it’s possibly because it’s environmentally acceptable and a cheaper option than stormwater recycling or rainwater tanks. I’d prefer to spend the money on solving other problems. We’d probably save a couple of billion dollars in Victoria alone doing it this way; that’s a couple of billlion dollars that could be spend shutting down coal-fired power stations.
If you want to teach people lessons, buy television ads. It’s a lot cheaper.
TV ads may be way cheaper but they don’t work. They work if you’re attempting to reinforce existing patterns of behaviour but are next to useless as regards significantly changing entrenched habits.
& my point about engineers is that the full costings of efficiency are rarely if ever done. The environmental, social & micro-economic costs are not factored in to large-scale projects – be it the NSW government permitting new large scale coal mines in areas with significant water supply issues, or piping water out of the Goulburn Valley system for profligate wastage in the urban system. A key point that keeps being missed or ignored is that we have to massively reduce our consumption of resources, not simply finding new ways to exploit what’s left. From industry inefficiencies such as open-channel irrigation to households washing twelve towels daily.
Logging takes carbon out of the atmosphere, it’s a net carbon sink.
Less than 200 hectares out of ~57 000 hectares in the Thomson are logged every year – and the modelled water yield is increasing every year.
And the licences will cost a lot more than $3.9M to buy out.
The real threat, that dwarfs any logging impacts (perceived or actual) is a large bushfire. Which is inevitable.
So many nutshells! And ‘the pooh factor’ is in a nutshell within a nutshell. Impressive.
But seriously: If policy makers got the market for water right — allowing trade from rural to urban areas and charging the ‘right’ price for water — we’ be much better off. To get people on board, this could include a right for every person to 75ML a year for free, then pay full (long run marginal) cost after that.
Of course, there would still be a role for Govt, such as providing natural monopoly infrastructure like big pipelines. However, mandating rainwater tanks and grey water systems is almost certainly bad policy. Too expensive for too little water. And if it is justifiable, people will do it themselves if prices are right. Market failures such as information or capital constraints can be addressed if it benefits outweigh costs.
And let’s not forget the environment. Here’s a link to a discussion I had with Possum Commitatus on the Murray Darling plan and better ways to secure environmental flow for the river system.
Large scale dams are always and environmental trade off and inefficient as water saving mechanisms (because of the large amount of evaporation and loss of water getting to and from the dams). In times of water shortages the Shoalhaven River is harvested by pipeline to top up Sydney dams but it is estimated that as much as 60% of this water is lost before it gets to the consumers tap. So in the drought the Shoalhaven was badly stressed to get just 40% of the water taken from it to Sydites so they didn’t have to go to Stage 4 restrictions and the North Shore could continue to have full swimming pools and exotic green gardens. (Surveys showed the greatest individual users of water during the drought have been the wealthy Sydney suburbs.)
Apart from the 3 Gorges dam (which is already creating a desert and has changed many other environments up and down stream, mostly for the worse), there are not many major dam projects out there anymore. Even the US who had a preponderance to dam everything above a trickle have mostly stopped building dams. Even large scale farm dams (and especially the massive schemes like Cubby’s) cause micro environmental changes around them and lose much to evaporation.
Beattie’s dam plan is asking for yet another future environmental disaster that another generation will have to pay for.
Recycling and storm water harvesting are definitely the go, especially where in places like Sydney there are large underground areas to store the water.
Apart from the Grand Inga, that is.
Wikipedia tells us that the Grand Inga is part of a series of Inga dams , albeit the biggest by far.
Meanwhile back in Oz, Robert says engineers assure us that
With great respect, Robert, I’d like to hear from marine biologists as well. It may be that the Melbourne project is OK environmentally, but I haven’t heard anything authoritative about the environmental acceptability of the one we are building at Tugun on the Gold Coast. I worry about the currents sweeping the salt northwards. Recently they found the body of a drowned swimmer 40k further north.
Given my worries about desalination, the lack of suitable dam sites and the unwillingness of the people of Northern NSW to give us their water from the Clarence, my support for rainwater tanks is based on the fact that it seems the only major untapped source. So it relates to our particular circumstances.
Alternatively we could send some of the ‘Mexican’ invaders back south.
With great respect, Robert, I’d like to hear from marine biologists as well. It may be that the Melbourne project is OK environmentally, but I haven’t heard anything authoritative about the environmental acceptability of the one we are building at Tugun on the Gold Coast. I worry about the currents sweeping the salt northwards. Recently they found the body of a drowned swimmer 40k further north.
That’s entirely reasonable to worry about. However, as I understand it standard computational fluid dynamics techniques can be used to model the dispersal of the salt, given decent models of the typical currents. If it’s a problem, you need to build more widely dispersed outfalls. Yes, you’d want to consult marine biologists as well.
At some point, of course, the cost of making sure the brine doesn’t pose a significant environmental problem could potentially exceed that of rainwater tanks, but frankly that strikes me as unlikely given just how expensive retrofitting rainwater tanks is.
But the wider point that this is a system that you can model before you can construct it to be pretty sure that it’s not a problem.