Re: This is all kinds of wrong
Surely the Oxygen supply, else hordes of canabilistic Londoners will head North through starvation. Like when Millwall play away!
How politicians could end droughts forever But they don't want to
Last month in old London town and across England, formal water rationing came into force again for the second time in just six years - and the creeping rationing of water meters continued to spread. Despite the rainiest April since records began, government minsters are openly speculating that total mains cutoffs and standpipes …
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 14:19 GMT Reg. Blank
wind pump
Is there something inherent in the desalination process that produces CO2, or is it just the amount of energy used that the greenies say can only be generated by fossil fuelled power stations?
To me, this would seem to be the ideal thing to power with those unreliable wind turbines, which are otherwise pretty rubbish at supplying the grid. Use wind power to top off reservoirs with desalinated water. Provided the reservoirs have enough capacity for a week or so of no wind this should be fine, and even if there's no wind for two weeks you can use "regular" power as a back up.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 15:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: wind pump
If RO desalination is anything like RO purification for aquarium water, you can't stop and start the process, this is one of the reasons that I buy RO water from my local fish shop. If you do stop and start, you can end up with water that is infected with various things you wouldn't want to drink.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 14:21 GMT Charles 9
I've heard of the desalination approach before, but based on everything I've read so far, most desalination plants are energy-intensive (yes, even vacuum distillation and reverse osmosis plants--the latter because you need high fluid pressures to deliver practical permeate production rates). Most practical designs couple them to power plants as a sort of "energy dump"--if the energy being produced (especially in big plants like nuclear plants) isn't needed right now, fire up the desalinator. Many nuclear-powered ships already use this technique to avoid having to stop for water.
Perhaps someone can clarify just how much power is needed to desalinate seawater for, say, 1 million people at acceptable flow rates (just to keep things honest--producing 1 million potable liters doesn't mean much if they're being consumed faster than they're being made).
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 15:17 GMT bonkers
Perhaps someone can read the article for me?
power required is 7kWh/tonne, personal consumption is 167 L/day.
I don't see why flow rate should be anything other than 167 million litres/day, for 1 million people.
I like the Energy dump point though, this is really easy "energy storage" - well actually timed usage, but works nearly as well.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 14:22 GMT David Webb
"enough to increase the cup's price by a few pence"
That's per cup, I'm guessing Londoners drink more than a cup a day so you end up having to add costs to everything that requires water pushing costs up and up and up, you may think that adding a few pence is meaningless but lets assume you drink 5 cups of tea/coffee a day and it puts 3p on the price of a cup of coffee. Over a year you are paying an extra £18.25 for just your coffee. Add in other stuff that needs water (washing, showers, clean clothing, toilet, brushing teeth) and the few pennies over a year add up very quickly.
Your water company isn't a charity either, they are not going to swallow the costs of desalination, they will stick it on your water bills, living in Cornwall we know pretty well that high water bills are a pain in the arse. Would you be happy to see your water bill rise from £339/year to the average Cornish rate of £543?
So, go ahead, which politician is going to say "ok, we're going to get rid of drought forever! But it's going to up your water bills by a few hundred quid and you'll end up having to pay a few hundred more on stuff you consume over a year, but it's ok, you never need to worry about drought again!"
Your maths also doesn't add up on the pipe fixing, they fix the pipes so X amount of water isn't lost, they could have built 2 plants which cost Y money (and Z up-keep costs) instead, rather than fixing the pipes which costs nothing in the long run and saves money as well as water.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 15:07 GMT Andrew James
£339 is ridiculously cheap. Where does that figure come from?
I currently pay just under £500 per year, but was using more like £700 per year until the last 12 months or so when I've actually started trying not to waste water. Threw out the dishwasher and switched back to washing by hand, replaced the washing machine with a better one with better programming to be more water efficient, take quicker showers, siphon the kids bathwater into a waterbutt for the garden during the summer months, etc.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 17:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Agreed
Dishwashers use a *lot* less water than washing dishes by hand. In the same way that front loading washing machines use a *ton* less water then top-loaders.
My only beef with dish washers is the "heat dry" setting, which we pointedly never use. Just set it going when you go to bed and by morning they've pretty much dried themselves by evaporation anyway.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 19:28 GMT Law
kids bathwater
"siphon the kids bathwater into a waterbutt for the garden during the summer months, etc."
Do you let them wash with soap? For some reason I see bubble-bath, shampoo, soap as being bad for plants. Is that not true? If not, I may consider a similar thing - ours has a bath every other night - we aren't metered, but I limit baths to every other night because of the cost of gas heating a bath full of water.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 20:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: kids bathwater
I've actually heard some people say the detergent in the gray water is mildly beneficial for plants... at the very least it doesn't seem to be too bad:
"Soaps are readily degraded by microbes (Steber and Berger, 1995), with nearly complete degradation in aerobic and anaerobic digistors in about four weeks... differences in soil types can be expected to influence the degradation rate of some chemicals."
http://www.buttecounty.net/publichealth/environmental/Graywater%20Study%20National.pdf
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 17:28 GMT Frederic Bloggs
Er... I think you will find that the amount of water quoted is the number of litres in total to grow, process and transport the beans, as well as produce yer actual cup of coffee. If one simply accounts for the actual water in the cup, the cost is several orders of magnitude smaller than Lewis quotes.
Even in a Grande.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 15:10 GMT Andrew James
Re: 15 desalination plants
I bet you could find suitable locations for half a dozen if you really wanted to. And since at least a quarter of the year is full of decent rainfall in this country, you wouldnt need 15 plants running flat out all the time since the existing water supply manages pretty well 95% of the time. You just need enough capacity to ensure when things are drying up that you can keep the supply coming for a few weeks.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 16:03 GMT Some Beggar
Re: 15 desalination plants
A brownfield site that is large enough for a desalination plant, has access to sea water, and can be plumbed into the existing water system without digging up or knocking down something important?
I'm struggling a bit. Perhaps they could flip the 02 Millenium Dome upside down and fill that up like a massive soup bowl?
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 17:53 GMT The Wegie
Re: 15 desalination plants
Battersea Power station.
The Stag Brewery in Mortlake now that it's closing down.
The current WRWA waste disposal depot at Smuggler's Way.
And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head up in my end of town. Further east, there are considerably more possibilities. Part of the Tate and Lyle site would be an obvious candidate.
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Friday 4th May 2012 15:51 GMT Ross 7
Re: 15 desalination plants
Errr, Battersea is on the *river* not the estuary. Nowhere near salt water.
Smugglers Way is closer to Slough than the sea!
The T&L site on Factory Rd is a possibility, but given it's located very close to the Beckton plant it may just end up taking out more river water - the point of desalination is to leave the rivers well alone and use the sea.
So you've named one spot out of a required 15, and that one spot is pretty much next door to an existing plant. It's not easy is it, ergo my post. London is chock full of stuff already - finding places you can build desalination plants is very, very difficult, unless cost isn't a factor and you're happy to pipe stuff for miles. And then leakages become a significant factor, so instead of 15 plants we need 30, so at least double LPs fag packet maths total.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 14:34 GMT Pete 2
Irrational rationing
> ... and the creeping rationing of water meters continued to spread
Personally I was very pleased to see the advent of "rationing" when the installation of a water meter at our house dropped the annual bill from a flat-rate £440 to a pay-for-what-you-use cost of £160 p.a. Though it's worth noting that this is still significantly higher; both in standing charge and in cost per m³, than water bills in "dry" areas such as the desert regions of Spain.
As for the rest of the article, TL;DR
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 15:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Irrational rationing
"TL;DR"
Why do people fucking do this? "Ooh, look at me, I couldn't be arsed to read something, and I think every-fucking-body needs to know about my tragically limited attention span."
In fact I'm fucking amazed you managed to successfully write those 5 characters without getting distracted by a passing butterfly, wandering off after it and falling out of a 3rd floor window after forgetting you were upstairs. And even then half way to the ground you probably fucking expect to be able to fly, just because you forgot you have the aerodynamic properties of a graceless elephant caught in a wind tunnel.
The one saving grace is that I could probably get away with insinuating your mother is a rampant french crack-whore and you wouldn't realise given as how you got bored of reading this already.
Fuck, this is why I hate people.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 15:28 GMT peter wegrzyn
Re: Irrational rationing
"when the installation of a water meter at our house dropped the annual bill from a flat-rate £440 to a pay-for-what-you-use cost of £160 p.a. "
Lucky you, my fixed charges are half my old flat-rate bill and the per tonne price is so high my bills are near the old flat rate, even though I'm a single person using very little water. The flat rate is supposed to assume two people living in my flat. In fact with meter I hit the same charge with about 167liter one person average.
Now I know water costs far less than 20p per tonne and thames charge 117p per tonne plus 580p for disposal
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 15:57 GMT Pete 2
@peter wegrzyn
> thames charge 117p per tonne plus 580p for disposal
Holy crap! (actually, that might explain it) Thames charge us the same 117p / m³ to deliver but only 59p/m³ to take it away again. Odd that they're charging you 10 times as much.
p.s. to AC 15:22: awwwwww! did someone not get their hug today?
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 18:11 GMT Greemble
Re: @peter wegrzyn
@15:28 GMT peter wegrzyn
"... even though I'm a single person"
And
@16:27 GMT peter wegrzyn
"Wife demanded a hug..."
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Curious domestic arrangements you seem to have.
Another typo, forget you were married or does she live somewhere else?
Sherlock - there's a mystery here...
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 16:02 GMT Some Beggar
Re: And once you have desalinated this water at sea level ...
Thank you. I am quite aware that some pumping is already required. I was wonering why the additional pumping required to get water from sea level to reservoirs had been ignored in Lewis's schoolboy arithmetic.
Pumping water is hard. Many people in the UK do not live within easy reach of sea water. Even in Australia where most of the population live on the beach and they have available space to build plants near to populations they still require a serious amount of pumping. Either Lewis forgot about this, or he's being ... what word do the Mods allow? ... slightly disingenuous.
(the water in my bathrooms does arrive by gravity alone, as it happens ... it rolls down a mountain and then down a glorified hosepipe ... I should probably insert a smug emoticon here or something)
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 19:34 GMT gloucester
Re: And once you have desalinated this water at sea level ...
Just perhaps this *is* something that Wind Power, which otherwise has supply/demand issues, might be good for? I think one of the other posts had it that running the desalination plant would only amount to c. 0.3% of electricity load, so minimal affect at smoothing generation peaks. When not taken out of the rivers, water currently comes from groundwater (by definition down), or reservoirs (often up); couldn't peak wind pump water from ground to hill-side, while on windless days the desalination plant re-fed the groundwater? The figures still might not work out right of course.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 16:03 GMT Some Beggar
Re: "Should everybody move to the Fens?"
The fens are busy pumping perfectly good water back into the sea
You know what ... I always vaguely assumed that the water pumped off the Fens was re-used somehow. But it's all down-river from the big reservoirs so I don't suppose it can be.
The article may be twaddle but at least I've learned one thing.
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Thursday 3rd May 2012 08:14 GMT Some Beggar
Re: And once you have desalinated this water at sea level ...
moving to Manchester / North Wales and Northumbria
In the grand watery scheme of things this would make a fair bit of sense. But the only way a rapid mass migration like that would be feasible is if we were governed by a Chinese-style autocracy.
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Wednesday 2nd May 2012 17:34 GMT Frederic Bloggs
Re: And once you have desalinated this water at sea level ...
Has any considered the up side of all these leaks at all?
Bear in mind that the UK is heavily reliant on aquifers and that, during warmer months water does not translocate from the surface into said aquifers, therefore leaks have the side effect of replenishing the aquifer more efficiently than rain. And more quicker as the leaky pipes are generally a bit nearer as well!
Pity that someone has spent a load of energy cleaning it first, but at least one can't complain that it's going to pollute anything.
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