I see it has been operating for 18 months and “…SA Water admitted the plant is likely to be mothballed in 2015 after its warranty period expires.”
Opposition Leader, Steven Marshall, says the Government should not have doubled the plant’s capacity from 50 to 100 gigalitres. “The original cost estimate for the 50 gigalitre site or infrastructure was going to be $500 million. We now find out the Government’s spent $2.2 billion,” he said.
“That of course is not money that the Government has paid. That’s money that every single water consumer in South Australia is going to be paying from now on.”
Sounds like another episode in the string of Australian desalination disasters and White Elephants.
I was looking for information summarizing the Adelaide water supply. This metro area map shows a lot of reservoirs and pipelines from the Murray River. However I can not find figures showing how much scheme water is sourced from rainfall around Adelaide and how much is from the river.
The water we use in South Australia comes from a variety of sources: the River Murray, Mount Lofty reservoirs and groundwater being the key supplies. For SA Water customers the amount of water required from the River Murray varies from about 40 per cent of Adelaide’s water needs in a normal rainfall year to as much as 90 per cent in a dry year.
www.sawater.com.au/SAWater/WhatsNew/WaterDataUpdate/ReservoirData/