Is anyone else concerned with the latest adds promoting the Sydney Desalination plant? Not only have they closed down the best bits of the bay but on the new adds that Joanna Griggs is flogging the project, they are saying that it's going to be powered 100% by wind power! This is Sydney for god's sake. The things never going to pump a drop if it's only powered by wind. We're doooommed...

there is a new sign by the Bestic st car park indicating that anywhere north of the net looks to be completley out of bounds, I have not found much info on how the pipe line production will effect the crossing of the bay. mind you at the moment with the 'mega wind' we are having there will be little impact
'Microtunnelling' hmmmm [}:)]

Did anybody else catch the article about the Kwinana Desalination Plant (WA) just prior to the storm we'd had.

The article reported :

Operations at the plant have been cut to one sixth capacity because of low dissolved oxygen levels in Cockburn Sound.

The Corporation is now waiting for a windy day to increase the oxygen levels.

The Environment Manager David Luketina says it has had a significant impact on production.

(For those not in WA, Cockburn Sound is a protected bay, so without wind, the water is pretty stagnant.)

Our potential desal plant is to be green energy "offset" powered.Meaning they,ll buy green energy from some where.Could be a problem as this one,s going to gobble up 4% of Vic,s electricity and produce 23360m2 per year of salt (for land fill) All for 200Gl of water See ,no wind makes me grumpy

Mobydisc said...

Why can't they sell the salt? There are treatment chemicals in it

Your premier Brumby is almost as bad a Iemma. I remember Brumby blaming that day of high winds in Victoria on man induced climate change. Yeah they didn't have storms a thousand years ago. Idiot.

The desal plants are not needed in Sydney. Fact is the last big dam, Warragamba was built about 50 years ago when Sydney's population was probably about a million people. The population has quadrupled then but somehow we still have the same number of dams. Sure they are pumping water from the Shoalhaven river but there are plenty of gorges around Sydney they could dam. If you think that this is an environmentally responsible solution then your an idiot. Agree that desal plants are not needed but until you convince all the idiots that drinking recycled wastewater will not kill you then we are stuck with this solution.

Recycled water sounds really good BUT as I read it the levels of hormomes in the water increase the more often it is recycled.I dont think there is any way to remove them.
The consequences for an adault is probabley minimal at the most BUT it does have extremely undesirable consequences for our (read in your own) children.
Use the water for irrigation and these same hormones probabley migrate through the food chain with the same consequences.I dont know the answers but I do know the person who shouts the loudest is probabley incorrect,and the person with the correct answers cant be heard for the shouting.

Oh well,

We should dismantle Warragamba and Woronora Dams as they are the cause of global warming and decreased rainfall. Year 10 geography covers the climate of Australia and explains why Australia cities need around ten times the water storage capacity of the North American and European counterparts.

Tell Sydney Water they are dealing with a closed system as they spent many millions on offshore sewerage outfall pipes.

Every farmer knows the bigger your water tank and dams, the longer the drought you can live through.

I am not for the desalination plant. I am not for daming every stream and creek around the place. However if we continue to have unrestricted population growth in certain parts of Australia then one day we run into the problem of a lack of water.

Water conservation is needed. I grew up on a farm and understood the importance of conserving water. Even the highest water restrictions a townie is put on is nothing compared to living on a farm during a long drought.

Due to variable rainfall patterns of south eastern Australia, if we want to have reasonably reliable water supplies then we need to both conserve water and also to capture as much water as we can when it does rain.

Since we haven't done either we are getting the desalination plant.

ka43 said...

Im with Rex on this one.
We dont a bloody desal plant, we need to manage our water and other resources in a better way.
If you lived in an area that the slow witted government wanted to dam I doubt you would be very happy.
As it is the thing is going to impact on not just us windsurfers but lots of other Sydney siders. Imagine if you owned a nice property at Kurnell. Not only do you have a stinking oil refinery on your door stop but soon a gi-normous desal plant pumping out God knows how much crap into our already hard pressed environment.

I don't think the desal plant will make much impact on Kurnell at all. Seriously, with the refinery already there, a desal plant is not going to bother you at all. As far as I can tell, the refinery doesn't bother you either. You don't even know its there.

What is the desal plant going to put out besides heat, fresh water, and super-saline water? I can't imagine they are going to be burning anything (well not onsite anyway). Sure, it's going to consume a bucket load of electricity though...

There are a lot of planes flying low overhead, and they aren't going to stop, so it's not exactly a quiet area either.

I'm pretty sure that the refinery was there before a lot of people and the area was relatively cheap to buy into before the recent housing boom. All the shacks there seem to have been bought out and turned into mansions with water views. No doubt they will be complaining about the planes and the tankers soon disturbing their views.

I'm not a fan of the desal plant, but I think it's a difficult problem. The political process only seems to allow short term solutions, and there is no land to use for a dam. If we hadn't had rain, then people would have been climbing over themselves to say the desal plant is a great idea.

Now, if only they put pontoons out a couple of hundred metres to reduce the chop and make it a great place to sail in a southerly as well...

I have yet to hear a good arguement against the desal plant.

It will be ugly - so is the refinery at Kurnell.
It will get in the way of our windsurfing - but only for a while.
It will use a lot of electricity - but only a fraction of what alum smelting in the Hunter uses (Tomago)
It will supplement our water supply - at a fraction of what it costs to pump water from shoalhaven. Pumping water is outragously expensive and energy inefficient.
There are NO gorges around Sydney that can be dammed economically - Name one that is close enough to Sydney, does not have a major population base upstream in the catchment and has both sufficient capacity and volume of flow.
Water tanks are great, but every litre captured is a litre that is not returned to groundwater. This is a Zero Sum scenario - ask anyone whose house is subsiding because of the lack of moisture in the soil.

I think we need a multi pronged approach, we need both desal and water treatment to supplement the dams. All the reaserch I have seen shows that modern water treatment does remove almost all of the hormones and pharmaceuticals in wasterwater, and there is no cumulative effect.

One year ago the dams were at about 30% capacity, and we had about another year of water left. If we were to turn the tap on and get nothing we would all be screaming that the government did nothing. They are doing something now to ensure suply for the future.

The only reason this reeks is because it reeks of responsible government, something we are not exactly used to.

Flame on,

JB

The main argument against the desalination plant is it basically says we can continue to live the way we have, being wasteful with water. The second argument is it requires a large amount of energy to desalinate the water. Much less energy is required to purify storm water.

When I refer to 'we' I refer to our society as a whole. There are some individuals who would be very mindful of water conservation. There are others who are extremely wasteful. Some industrial processes require huge amounts of fresh water. If you are doing your bit then good on you. However that doesn't negate the fact that as a whole, we basically waste a large percentage of the water we do have.

Part of the problem comes from Sydney Water's prior actions. They discouraged people from having their own water tanks. They sold water cheap. Even now water is very cheap. Every quarter I get a water bill. Its about $104. Of the $104, $4 is for water use and $100 is the sewerage connection fee. Now I can look forward to something like another $100 a quarter to pay for the desalination plant ontop of my $4 of water.

Anyway the ad saying the desalination plant will be powered by wind power is to be taken with a grain of salt. We get bugger all wind in NSW and there aren't that many wind farms around the place. People don't like them because birds apparently are killed by the windmills, they make noise and they are ugly.

Mobydisc said...


Now I can look forward to something like another $100 a quarter to pay for the desalination plant ontop of my $4 of water.

Anyway the ad saying the desalination plant will be powered by wind power is to be taken with a grain of salt. We get bugger all wind in NSW and there aren't that many wind farms around the place. People don't like them because birds apparently are killed by the windmills, they make noise and they are ugly.

I would rather have the government provide free or very cheap rainwater tanks, but I baulk at having to pay a few thousand when tap water is so cheap.

I think the next wind farm is meant to go in somewhere near Lake Bathurst/Tarago (I forget the name of the place). It is supposedly the windiest place in the state, so it can't be too bad. This is what is meant to provide the green power for the desal plant.

Saying 'we get bugger all wind in NSW' seems fair enough when you are focussed on windsurfing, but isn't correct when you check out the wind stats.

Last time I visited Crookwell there was plenty of wind, and I recently did a bike ride past a small private wind farm. I can attest to the fact there was plenty of headwind around then!

DavMen said...
[

The only people I hear complaing about them (wind turbines) are the farmers who don't have them on thier properties because they miss out on the $$$.

But I do agree, its alot of gov. spin about the Desal Plant being powered by Wind.

I lived in Crookwell for a few years till the end of 2006. Its true there did seem to be a bit of wind up there. Perhaps we need to sail on the dam there, but I don't think there is much water left in it as it all goes downstream to Goulburn.

There have been proposals for more windfarms around the area and there is a suprising amount of resistance. While farmers probably don't mind it; a large number of people from Sydney move up there, buy about 5 acres of land and stick their new house on it. These people generally do not want a big wind turbine within viewing distance or earshot. Some arguments I remember (there are probably more)

1. Birds get killed by the blades.
2. Windmills are ugly.
3. Windmills generate a great deal of noise and subsonic vibrations.
4. The ones proposed are so large they need a navigation light ontop. This blinking light is unsightly.
5. No local jobs will be created.
6. It will take away from jobs in the Hunter Valley coal and power industry.

Its basically NIMBYism. I always like seeing windmills, especially when they are whirring fast. However personally I probably would not like one in my yard. I doubt the good burgers of Bondi, Manly or Palm Beach would be too receptive to big windmills being stuck on the headlands or exposed bluffs in their neck of the woods either.

Sydney recycles 2-3% of water (lowest of any developed city in the world).
Dams are currently 68% full.
Local government makes more money the more water you use, as does the Water board.
Logic... Don't bother capturing any water, either recycled or run off i.e. let clean water drain into the ocean every time it rains.
Then, build a +$2billion machine that will take salt water from the ocean and remove the salt. (i think a 5yr old child could point out the floored logic).

Then, pump all the salt back into the ocean while using electricity like we have never used before, under the false pretense that it is powered by green sources (Bull***t)...All the time taking no regard of the environmental impacts.

Another interesting thought. Why can a wind farm be built in just 11months if required, but yet the state government still choose to build more coal plants. I guess BHP and Rio can't mine wind?

Interesting discussion. On wind towers,(they look at bit ugly), so does smog,(They kill birds) Cars do a better job of killing more, (Their noisy) The old models are,but the newer ones are better. How do I know all this. I live 2km from 6 and yet to hear one.

On Desal plants ,I will live 3km from a potential one that at last guess will cost $8B to build and cost us $500m per year to rent from a private company for the next 30yrs. It will be the only building (35 h x 3 stories high) on the coast.It will increase our electrical use by 4% (Love that brown coal) Their not noisy (Gov says)but the company is spending $10m on earth works to reduce noise.It cost half as much to recycle wastewater and blackwater.The Prem stated that water restrictions will stay in place untill the plant is up and running in 2009.The average water use per person per day in Toorak for 2007 was 1085l. Thats one big roller to wash.
Buy a water tank.......Enough ranting ....I need some wind

Ian K said...

Flawed logic alright, I guess Jaybee's argument says that pumping water all the way from the Shoalhaven is even more flawed.

I've cynically thought that the only reason they don't raise the price of water is that some clever market researcher has calculated that if they doubled the price householders would cut back and only use 1/3 as much? Is the price of water set to maximize profit?

Dropped in at the viewing station at the wind farm near Cervantes recently. The information board indicated that the cost per MW of constructing a wind farm was comparable to that of a coal fired station. From then on the wind is free. Wind farms would knock off a few knots for a good area downwind though, we've got to be careful where we let them put them.

I think the Shoalhaven had water restrictions themselves not so long ago, so the ability to pump from there is not always possible.

With water restrictions at the moment, I think you could double or tripple the cost of water and allow people to use more, and they still would.

The maintenance costs of the wind farms are not insignificant, and the coal powered plants can provide base load generation, not just when the wind is working. If the wind farms were that good, more companies would be building them. Without charging extra for 'green' power, no one wants to build them.