Source: The Australian
HOUSEHOLDS will pay hundreds of dollars extra for water as state governments splash $9 billion of taxpayer funds on energy-guzzling desalination plants that will produce nearly a third of capital-city supplies within two years.
The seawater purification “factories” - which can pump out enough drinking water each year to fill Sydney Harbour - will operate around the clock at taxpayer expense, even when high rainfall means their expensive output is not required.
Water utilities yesterday warned urban water prices would spiral in line with the rising cost of electricity needed to operate the massive plants in Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne and the Gold Coast.
The Water Services Association of Australia, representing most of the urban water utilities nationally, estimated water providers would use up to four times as much electricity as they moved from dams to desalination.
“The cost of building desalination plants will be reflected in water prices across Australia,” executive director Ross Young told The Weekend Australian.
“In places like Melbourne in the next four years (water) prices are going to double.”
By 2012, water bills for Sydneysiders will rise $103 a year purely to pay for the cost of running the city’s first desalination plant, costing $2.4bn, due to open at Kurnell within weeks.
Household water bills will soar nearly a third - from $663 to $904 - in the Melbourne metropolis over the next three years, once a $3.5bn plant - the nation’s biggest - comes online at the end of next year.
In southeast Queensland, where a $1.2bn desalination plant opened on the Gold Coast last year, water bills are forecast to rise about $60 annually until 2013.
In Adelaide, where a $1.83bn plant will open at the end of next year, water bills will increase $84 this year for an average household.
In Perth, which will open its second plant next year, the average household water bill will rise 10 per cent over the next three years, costing high-use households as much as $164 a year more.
Mr Young said higher bills would give consumers an incentive to save water.
“Any resource given away free is always exploited,” he said. “If water is priced too low there’s no incentive for conservation or to upgrade infrastructure.
“We shouldn’t underestimate the power of a price signal.”
CSIRO urban water research division leader Alan Gregory said electricity made up a quarter of the total cost of building and running a desalination plant.
“Just the energy component alone will drive up the cost of water,” he said. “You haven’t got to be Einstein to work out that prices will go up. It’s unavoidable.”
A CSIRO analysis for the Water Services Association has found that desalination plants use seven times more electricity than conventional water treatment plants.
The research reveals that energy consumption by water utilities would rise 400 per cent if they switched entirely to desalination for city water supplies within 20 years.
Energy use would soar by 260 per cent if utilities sourced 40 per cent of their water from the ocean.
The National Water Commission has calculated that the running costs of a typical desalination plant would jump 16 per cent if an emissions trading scheme is introduced that prices carbon at $50 a tonne.
Critics of the states’ massive investment in desalination yesterday dismissed the technology as “financially risky”.
Stuart White, the director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures, at the University of Technology, Sydney, said the desalination plants roped taxpayers and consumers into paying for water that might not always be necessary.
“Once you build them, there’s the imperative to operate them,” Mr White said yesterday.
“Sometimes (it’s) a contractual imperative . . . flat-out.”
In Sydney, where dams are now half-empty, the new Kurnell plant will run at full capacity for at least two years, regardless of rainfall levels.
Operators of the desalination plants are trying to douse the debate over greenhouse gas emissions by buying “green power” from sources such as wind farms. But in Western Australia, the government pricing watchdog has vetoed the Water Corporation’s plan to charge its consumers the extra cost of buying more expensive experimental green electricity to power Perth’s desalination plants.
The West Australian Economic Regulation Authority’s chairman, Lyndon Rowe, said yesterday the role of the Water Corporation was to “provide water to consumers at the least possible cost”.
“If a government itself wants to sponsor the research (into renewable energy) it’s fine, but it shouldn’t be a cost borne by water users,” he said.
Mr Rowe likened desalination plants to “water factories”.
“We can produce all the water you like but it can’t be free,” Mr Rowe said.
“It should be paid for by the users, to encourage people to use water wisely.”
Fluoride foe expressed bitterness
Irene Johnson, the leader of Brainerd’s anti-fluoride forces, was an independent Montana native who wasn’t shy about carrying a grudge. The fluoride opponent died in 2001 at the age of 81.
While being interviewed from her nursing home room in 2000 for a story on the 20th anniversary of Brainerd’s fluoridation of the water she still expressed bitterness at the mention of a particular judge’s name.
“Boy, that old goat,” she said of her old foe. “I hope he had gallstones.”
Fluoride appealed to highest court
A 1974 Minnesota District Court ruling, which ordered Brainerd to fluoridate, was upheld by the Minnesota Supreme Court and then went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation’s highest court refused to hear the issue, sending that case to a legal dead end.
Constitutional meeting at Franklin
One of the more novel approaches fluoride opponents used in their long struggle against the 1967 fluoridation law was a constitutional convention that was conducted at Franklin Junior High School in July of 1974.
Delegates to the convention were members of the Brainerd City Council, the Brainerd Water and Light Board and the mayor.
In a 30-minute session the convention unanimously adopted a resolution declaring the state statute on fluoridation “absolutely unconstitutional, null and void and of no lawful force and effect.”
Among the speakers at the convention were then-council members Mary Koep and Gene Goedker. An estimated 200 people attended the session.
Copies of the resolution were forwarded to the governor, the chief judge of the Minnesota Supreme Court and other state officials. Special counsel Jack Graham was secretary of the convention and Mayor Tom O’Brien was permanent chairman.
Vandals weighed in on fluoride
The night after Brainerd fluoridated its water vandals defaced a sign near the old Brainerd water tower proclaiming the city’s water as “the world’s best drink.” The vandals painted over the original message and placed a sign with a skull and crossbones and the word “Contaminated.”
‘Got unfluoridated water?’
When the Brainerd City Council reluctantly yielded to the state on the fluoridation in October of 1979 it included a proviso. The council stipulated that when fluoride was added to the water the Water and Light Department must, at no cost, make available one gallon of unfluoridated water to each household on demand.
Information compiled from Brainerd Dispatch files by Associate Editor Mike O’Rourke.
GLAND, Switzerland, February 2, 2010 (ENS) - Today, World Wetlands Day is being celebrated with the full recognition of Africa’s Lake Chad as a wetland of international importance, fulfilling a commitment made 10 years ago by the four nations that share the continent’s fourth largest lake.The declaration today by the Cameroon Republic that its portion of Africa’s fourth largest lake is a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands follows similar declarations by Niger and Chad in 2001 and Nigeria in 2008.
“Lake Chad’s inscription as only the 13th trans-boundary formally recognized wetland is highly significant as 11 of the areas so far declared are in Europe,” said Denis Landenbergue, WWF International’s wetlands conservation manager.
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People fetching drinking water from Lake Chad. (Photo courtesy UN)
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WWF, which partnered with the Lake Chad Basin Commission, the Ramsar Convention and the Global Environment Facility on projects in Lake Chad and with the governments on achieving the declaration, said the challenge now is to “turn the promise of protection for Lake Chad into a reality for the millions that depend on it.”
Climate change, the demand for irrigation water upstream, and poor management decisions have reduced the size of Lake Chad by 90 percent over the past 40 years, according to the Ramsar Secretariat.
Lake Chad is the remnant of a vast lake known as Mega-Chad which 22,000 years ago drained a greener Sahara. Now the focal point of life in arid Sahelian Africa, the new internationally protected wetland is vital to endangered otters, gazelles and elephants as well as hippopotamuses, Nile crocodiles and many bird species.
Home to over 20 million people who depend on the lake for their fishing, hunting, farming and grazing, the entire Lake Chad basin is threatened by climate change, desertification and unsustainable management of water resources and fisheries, illustrating the theme of World Wetlands Day 2010 - Wetlands, Biodiversity and Climate Change.
Across the Sahara Desert, in another World Wetlands Day highlight, Algeria designated five new Wetlands of International Importance vital to the migrating birds on the northern side of the desert that stop at Lake Chad on the southern side.
The theme links to the UN designation of 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity and to the increasingly important issue of water scarcity on a warming planet. (more…)
Councils offered storm-water harvest funds
The Federal Govt will put $200 million towards stormwater recycling projects. (ABC News)
The Federal Government will contribute up to half the cost of stormwater recycling projects under an initiative announced by the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Penny Wong.
The Government has made $200 million available for the scheme, with the maximum contribution for each project capped at $20 million.
The scheme is open to state and local governments, public water utilities and private companies.
The projects must get all their energy needs from renewable sources to qualify.
The deadline for the first round of proposals is June 30.
Independent Senator Nick Xenophon says the stormwater harvesting initiative will encourage less reliance on the Murray-Darling river system.
Senator Xenophon says although he would like a bigger fund, it will encourage more investment in stormwater harvesting.
“The more stormwater we harvest, the less water we draw off the Murray,” he said.
“$200 million is the Commonwealth’s component and when you consider that the Commonwealth puts in up to half that money, we’re really looking at upwards of half a billion dollars of stormwater harvesting projects in the next two to three years and that is a huge boost in terms of stormwater harvesting.”
RUSTING in sea water, the $1.2 billion Gold Coast desalination plant required repairs soon after it opened. The showpiece of a Queensland government strategy to drought-proof the state’s booming southeast, the project has been plagued by so many construction flaws and unscheduled shut-downs that the government is still refusing to take possession from the contractors who built it.
A year after it was supposed to be pumping 125 megalitres of water a day into the water supply, the Tugun plant is running at two-thirds capacity. Cracking concrete and corroding components forged from substandard steel necessitated several shutdowns last year. Despite the fiasco, the Bligh government plans to press ahead with four new desalination plants for the state’s southeast, driving a national trend to divert investment from dams to desalination.
Within two years, 30 per cent of the water supplied to Australia’s capital cities will flow from the ocean, as water utilities in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and Perth splash $9bn of taxpayers’ money on new desalination plants. By 2013, desalination will be producing more than 450 gigalitres of drinking water - almost the volume of Sydney Harbour - every year.
The new technology is an insurance against drought on the driest continent on earth but it comes at a high and growing cost, economically and environmentally. The plants guzzle so much energy that detractors describe desalinated water as liquid electricity that is already adding hundreds of dollars to household water bills. (more…)
SUBURBAN Sydney will be turned into a giant stormwater harvesting system draining into a man-made wetlands as soaring prices pressure the hunt for alternative water sources.
Councils in Sydney’s west are investigating an $8.5 million wetland scheme, the first of its kind in NSW, which will take suburban water run-off and store it both underground and on council land.
Cheaper than desalinated sea water, the stormwater scheme would create a secure supply to be used for industry, commercial purposes and watering sports fields.
At the same time, it would attract thousands of birds to the area and create huge natural habitat to encourage wildlife back into the suburbs.
Leading research authority the National Water Commission is close to finishing a feasibility study into a managed aquifer recharge project for Penrith in Sydney’s west and councils are gearing up to lobby for funding.
Penrith City Council reports found stormwater captured in developed areas would provide enough non-potable water to be stored in an aquifer and pumped to commercial customers and council sporting fields.
“Alternative and more sustainable water supplies are needed, particularly when potable water supplies are limited during times of drought,” the council report said.
“There is reasonable likelihood that potable water pricing will increase in the medium term as the cost of the desalination plant flow through to Sydney Water’s pricing structure.”
Water Services Association of Australia executive director Ross Young said water prices would continue to rise as new infrastructure was built to cope with rising demand.
“All the cheap sources of water have been exploited. The new sources will be much more expensive,” he said.
“That is a key driver for prices increasing. Generally, water prices will go up because it is new infrastructure.”
A Nation Water Commission spokeswoman said investment was needed to combat water scarcity. The scheme is planned to be finished by 2013.
South Australian health authorities say they will meet people in Mount Gambier before the city’s fluoridation plant begins operating.
A former president of the Australian Dental Association, Dr Andrew Harms, wants a public debate with the South Australian Government over plans to fluoridate Mount Gambier’s water supply.
He says there are proven health risks associated with adding fluoride to drinking water.
David Cunliffe from SA Health says there are plenty of studies showing that fluoridation is safe and improves dental health.
“There is good Australian evidence that it reduces dental care needs and some of that has been led by Professor John Spencer from Adelaide and his team,” he said.
“So there are publications that show that adding fluoride does improve dental health?”Ed. – Who would be more likely to know a greater amount about fluoride, and it’s effect on tooth health – and general health; a dentist? or an official at the top administrative level of the Health Department? Of interest too, is that Dr. Harm’s campaign against fluoride, apparently began 7 years after a Cancer experience.
By DONNA JONES
WATSONVILLE - Watsonville residents won’t be drinking fluoridated water yet. On a 4-3 vote, the City Council decided not to accept a $2 million grant to pay for fluoridation until details of a contract with the California Dental Association Foundation are finalized.
The vote came after more than two hours of public testimony on both sides of the divisive issue, which has pitted health care professionals against people concerned about the safety of the practice.
“I’m very concerned with people’s rights,” said Councilwoman Nancy Bilicich. “I don’t like that we don’t have all the parts of the contract solidified. I think more of the details need to be worked out and they’re not there tonight.”
Fluoridation has been debated in the city for most of the past decade. The city has fought fluoridation, but state law requires cities with more than 10,000 water connections to fluoridate if outside money is available.
City and foundation officials have been negotiating a contract for the grant since 2006, but have not reached agreement on language related to liability and legal remedies for any breach of contract.
But few speakers discussed the contract, which most on the council agreed was the only issue left to them after a court ruled the city had to fluoridate if it was given funding.
Health professionals pointed to scientific support for fluoridation and local statistics that show dental care is less accessible in the Pajaro Valley than elsewhere in
“We know prevention works,” said Kathleen King, executive director of the Pajaro Valley Community Health Trust. “It’s been proven time and time again and fluoridation is our best prevention care.”
Sister Julie Hyer, executive director of Salud Para La Gente, also urged the council to move forward.
“Now is the time to act in accordance with California law and the prevailing scientific evidence,” Hyer said.
But fluoride foes expressed anger that their will, as shown in a 2002 voter-approved city initiative that effectively banned introduction of the substance into the water supply, would be ignored.
Watsonville resident Sam Earnshaw said fluoridation isn’t needed and even if it were , putting fluoride in a public water supply is a disproportionate action.
“A lot of people feel this is being jammed down our throats,” Earnshaw said. “It’s an issue of democracy.”
Some from outside the city said they’d stop buying Watsonville produce and juice.
“I will dedicate the rest of my existence to sharing information about beverages produced with fluoridated water,” said Kim Tunilla of Santa Cruz.
That’s just what John Martinelli, president of S. Martinelli & Co., is worried about. Martinelli doesn’t personally believe fluoridation is either effective or safe, but he said because of widespread opposition nationwide to fluoridated water, its use in his products would “cause irreparable harm to our company, our employees.”
“I cannot put it in my products,” he said. Mayor Luis Alejo proposed accepting the contract with changes recommended by City Attorney Alan Smith and directing staff to work with Martinelli to resolve his issues. If the foundation signed off the changes, fluoridation would move forward. But that motion was narrowly defeated.
Councilwoman Kimberly Petersen said the city is walking a fine line between trying to abide by state law and upholding the will of Watsonville voters. She proposed setting up a council committee to finalize contract details and explore options for Martinelli.
The council unanimously accepted her motion.
Alejo will appoint members to the committee this week. The issue could come back before the council in late February or in March.
Carly Crawford
From: Sunday Herald Sun
TOP Victorian water officials have been studying ways to turn sewage into drinking water.
On visits to the US, water officials from across Australia have toured California’s most advanced water purifying plant five times in the past year and a key delegation visited the plant, in California’s Orange County, again this month.
Several Victorians have seen the plant, including Bruce Dawson, who heads environmental services for the EPA, wastewater engineers from Barwon Water and academics from Monash University.
Publicly, Australian governments are committing only to desalinated water as our main alternative drinking water source.
But the government experts are studying one of the world’s best systems for making sewage fit to drink.
The system in Fountain Valley uses purifying techniques to transform treated sewer water into safe drinking water.
National Water Commission chief Ken Matthews was among those who toured the Californian plant in mid-January.
It was “inevitable” the contentious issue of drinking recycled wastewater would be back on Australia’s national agenda, Mr Matthews said.
Advocacy groups representing utilities, industry, agriculture and landowners are mounting an offensive against the proposed Clean Water Restoration Act, which is coming up for committee vote in the Senate.
The act, S 787, would broaden regulation of the nation’s waterways, most notably removing the requirement that regulated waterways be “navigable.”
In so doing, the government would essentially be able to regulate everything from standing water in floodplains to creeks that run behind business and residences.
In a letter to Senate Environment and Public Works Chair Barbara Boxer and ranking member James Inhofe, the American Farm Bureau Federation said that the proposed law would “extend to all water — anywhere from farm ponds, to storm water retention basins, to roadside ditches, to desert washes, to streets and gutters, even to a puddle of rainwater,” stated the letter. “For the first time in the 36-year history of the act, activities that have no impact on actual rivers and lakes would be subject to full federal regulation.”
Agricultural operations would be subject to civil lawsuits that currently are not possible, the Farm Bureau stated. If un-navigable waterways are added, businesses and farms would be subject to civil lawsuits from organizations and individuals who don’t like the way the business or farm is using property, reports Wilson County News.
The Heritage Foundation calls the act “troubled waters for property owners.”
The foundation says, “The CWRA is an invitation for federal regulators (or environmental organizations filing lawsuits) to shut down any use of land that they don’t like so long as there is a little water somewhere in the vicinity. If the past is any guide, this law will be used to stop a tremendous amount of economic activity.”
The act has the support of conservation groups including Ducks Unlimited, the National Wildlife Federation, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, and Trout Unlimited, states Ammoland.com.
The Clean Water Restoration Act calls for regulation over “all waters subject to the ebb and flow of the tide, the territorial seas, and all interstate and intrastate waters and their tributaries, including lakes, rivers, streams (including intermittent streams),” including “mudflats, sandflats, wetlands, sloughs, prairie potholes, wet meadows, playa lakes, natural ponds….”
The act may come up for vote in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee June 18.
The National Center for Public Policy Research has created a Web site with links about the act.
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