I have copied and pasted the below, I did some work on a store in Beckton at the end of last year and didn't know about this.
The first large-scale desalination plant to turn seawater into drinking water for homes and businesses in the UK will open today in the latest sign of growing concern about water stress in the country's most populated regions.
Although the technology is more normally associated with parched places such as the Middle East and Australia, the south-east of England – where the plant is located – has less rainfall per person than Istanbul, Dallas or Sydney.
Thames Water has spent £250m building the plant and pipes, and has said that the equipment will only be turned on at times of drought, when it can supply up to 1 million people.
During a protracted planning case against the opposition of former London mayor Ken Livingstone, Thames Water claimed that London and the surrounding region faced "a high risk of sever water shortages" unless the plant was allowed to go ahead.
However opponents have claimed that the plant will use too much energy and the company should be doing more to stop leaking pipes and reduce the average water use of customers by installing more water meters and better promotions.
Concern that the company will start using the plant more often have also been fuelled by subtle changes in their literature: initially the plant would be used "during times of drought", but later that became "mainly during times of drought".
Elsewhere, water industry experts have speculated that Thames Water could in the long-term connect the desalination plant directly to the next-door Beckton sewage plant, in east London, to produce recycled water. The recycling process uses similar technology and is usually cheaper than desalting water, but has so far been too unpopular to be accepted by homes anywhere in the world except the Namibian capital Windhoek.
In a sign of the pressure Thames Water could face if it tried to increase use of the Beckton desalination plant, the Environment Agency's head of water, Ian Barker, yesterday said: "Although the Beckton desalination plant will help to provide London with secure water supplies during times of drought and peak demand, we all must do more to reduce water consumption. The Environment Agency believes that metering should be rolled out to households in water-stressed areas. The water industry must also continue to manage leakage from its network of pipes."
Since the Beckton plant was first proposed in 2004, Thames Water has made repeated attempts to reassure critics, including promising that 100% of the energy used by the desalination works – which by desalting the briny water in the Thames estuary rather than water from the deep seas will use considerably less energy than normal plants – will come from "renewable" biofuel, made from plants. Following concern about the energy required to grow some fuel crops, the company has also suggested that in future it will try to use waste cooking fat and oil from the capital's restaurants and homes.
The company, which in the last financial year made pre-tax profits of £435m on income of £1.6bn, has also said that although it has been ahead of its targets to fix leaking pipes, the disruption of speeding up the programme could bring the city to "gridlock", and that efficiency campaigns have led to reductions in water use but it does not believe that alone they will "provide the scale of savings needed".
In the midst of its planning struggle, the company also said it had considered other options to help the capital cope with rising population and the increasing risk of dry summers because of climate change. "While desalination uses more energy than conventional water treatment, the lack of alternative freshwater resources means that all the options had to be considered," it said in a statement. "Desalination actually uses less energy than some of the other schemes we examined."
The company has also said it has designed the systems to take water from the river and return the briny waste on the outgoing tide to minimise the risk to wildlife.
So far Britain's only desalination facilities have been limited to individual buildings, like the Millennium Dome, or small plants to top up agricultural or public supplies in Jersey and the Isles of Scilly. In recent years, Southern Water has also said it will look at building a coastal desalination plant near Brighton on the south coast of England.
Rob
