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How can England possibly be running out of water?

theguardian.com

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Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#61

Post by derriz »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #42
antonvs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-o...

Article is outdated (2008) and makes a single argument: Desalination requires too much energy. Becaues it is outdated, it doesn't account for the excess energy a lot of places and countries have from wind and solar. Water desalination is a prime candidate (along with Bitcoin mining and AI model training, sigh ) for using available excess energy from renewable that cannot be stored otherwise. Clean/drinking water can…

Not really - renewable curtailment and negative wholesale electricity prices happen but not frequently enough that you can generally afford to leave a capital intensive investment like a bitcoin mining setup, a water desalination plant or a hydrogen electrolyser idle 90% of the time waiting for cheap electricity.

And the market and technological developments (batteries) are actively working against this pricing anomaly - I can see the phenomena of negative pricing disappear completely in electricity markets in the next few years given the current explosion in grid battery deployment.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#62

Post by tempfile »

ACCount37 wrote: post #27
Nursie wrote: post #7

> Forecasts indicate that by 2055 England’s public water supply could be short by 5bn litres a day > Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year. Seems like there's most of a solution here, just staring us in the face, no? Problem being of course, that the privatised water companies have little incentive or investment in order to tackle the problem. Are we ready t…

In a free market, if clean water gets expensive enough, then infrastructure overhauls to actually cut down on the leaks become economical. If everything is nationalized, you're relying on political goodwill instead to pay for those overhauls. I have no clue how UK's "privatized water companies" work though. I'm not going to be too surprised if UK's system somehow manages to combine all the disadvantages of private ow…

Water companies in the UK operate under regional monopoly, so most people only get a single company they can buy water from.

The free market approach seems to require allowing water companies to even build and maintain parallel infrastructure that can't be shared, if they consider it to be economical. That would require immense capital investment, meaning the barrier to entry would likely be very high. The "efficient" case, where joining an existing pipe infrastructure is cheap, due to competition, would entail having several parallel networks of pipes running between reservoirs and people's homes. This was viewed as profoundly wasteful, even by the Thatcher government that privatised water, and that's why it's forbidden by regional monopoly.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#63

Post by braza »

> People across England are already banned from using hosepipes, with more restrictions probable over coming months. > So how on earth did famously rainswept England, notorious the world over for being green and wet with our national symbol pretty much a furled umbrella, come to this? > The UK is one of the rainier places in Europe. Some areas are wetter than others > Water companies in England and Wales lose about 1tn litres of water through leaky pipes each year. The industry has said that about 20% of all treated water is lost to leaks. The water firms have pledged to halve leakages by 2050. > Meanwhile, the annual pipe replacement rate is 0.05% a year across all water companies

An honest request for enlightenment:There's the structural problem. There are the structural aspects of a potential solution. There's some mapping around the problem. Given that, why does the England government not provide a definitive solution?

As a former 3rd world resident, one thing that I noticed in Europe is that several basic problems do not have the right incentives or willingness to be solved, even if there are the "raw materials" in place, like capital, human talent, a need, and so on.

I know that some can think like the "Why Didn't I Think of That?" meme template [1], but I have been in worse places where you have several headwinds like corruption, lack of capital, etc.; I see that in England and in continental Europe you can see a lot of those "basic problems" happening and piling up. I wonder if those issues will be solved gradually or if those societies will need to have their “burning platform” moment [2].

[1] - https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/139781746/Why-Didnt-I-Thin....

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32698044

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#64

Post by autoexec »

sandbags wrote: post #34

As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources. What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992. So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of i…

When it comes to things like utilities every penny of profit comes at the expense of the public. Either prices are raised so that a small number of people can stuff their pockets with extra cash above what it costs to deliver the service and maintain the system or they get that extra money by failing to deliver the service or they do it by failing to maintain the system itself.

I think the neglect and failure to invest in infrastructure is the worst because unlike high bills or increasing numbers of people not being served it's more or less invisible to the public while companies and shareholders rake in a lot of money, but doing that causes problems tax payers end up footing the bill for down the road, and it may not always be obvious to the public what the cause was.

A power company who makes profit by neglecting the condition of their power lines can cause a wild fire, but it takes a lot of time, taxpayer money, and luck to identify that the lines were the source of the fire, to discover that the company knew (or should have known) about the problem and done something about it, to get enough proof of those things that a lawsuit is possible, and to fight it out in court in order to hold the company accountable. It's not just the cost of fire the public is on the hook for in that case, but the costs of everything else too.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#65

Post by littlecranky67 »

derriz wrote: post #61
littlecranky67 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article is outdated (2008) and makes a single argument: Desalination requires too much energy. Becaues it is outdated, it doesn't account for the excess energy a lot of places and countries have from wind and solar. Water desalination is a prime candidate (along with Bitcoin mining and AI model training, sigh ) for using available excess energy from renewable that cannot be stored otherwise. Clean/drinking water can…

Not really - renewable curtailment and negative wholesale electricity prices happen but not frequently enough that you can generally afford to leave a capital intensive investment like a bitcoin mining setup, a water desalination plant or a hydrogen electrolyser idle 90% of the time waiting for cheap electricity. And the market and technological developments (batteries) are actively working against this pricing anoma…

Might be true in the US, but here in Europe we see this quite often. Prices don't have to be negative, it is enough if they are cheap (we pay for water too). And in some locations there are already projects like this [0] where they built a hydro-electric pump station with a dam for storage plus a desalination plant that fills the reservoir from seawater in one location.

[0]: https://www.ree.es/en/ecological-transition/storage

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#66

Post by AlecSchueler »

tankenmate wrote: post #35
AlecSchueler wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting thing that happens here is also the conflation of company and country. You mention the oil companies blocking and obscuring the research, but GP was putting the blame on the shoulders of the "oil countries." Something to be aware of with the rise of weaponised xenophobia and general background islamophobia.

Corruption and undue political influence stemming from a large source of extractive income isn't a an issue particular to Islam as I can see it; in fact I'd say it's something endemic to the human condition. But, when it comes to oil production what I would say is that due to the overlapping geography of the foundation and consequent spread of Islam and largest and easiest to extract oil resources in the world being…

Your sentences are quite difficult to read so I apologise if I'm misunderstanding, but I think it's good to remember cases like Saudi where religious fundamentalists were placed into power by Western powers. These days we see them as representative of the Islamic world but it's largely our own doing.

I'm aware that there are non Islamic "oil countries" of course and I don't think the GP comment was equating oil with Islam. It's just something that does happen in other contexts and that we should be aware of when speaking, because there are very real real would consequences.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#67

Post by braza »

sandbags wrote: post #34

As the article mentions, privatised water companies have built no new reservoir capacity and relied on drawing from rivers and other sources. What the article doesn’t mention is that pre-privatisation a new reservoir was built every year up to about 1960 and then every few years until privatisation in 1992. So we are about 30 years behind in adding capacity to the system. This combined with the inadequate levels of i…

> Water should never have been privatised. At least not without a framework for a national strategy for water.

But one can make a very fair argument where you can have a strong regulatory framework to ensure investment goals, exit clauses, and penalties in case of missing goals, no?

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#68

Post by AlecSchueler »

daseiner1 wrote: post #19
AlecSchueler wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting thing that happens here is also the conflation of company and country. You mention the oil companies blocking and obscuring the research, but GP was putting the blame on the shoulders of the "oil countries." Something to be aware of with the rise of weaponised xenophobia and general background islamophobia.

That's hardly a "conflation". If you can meaningfully distinguish Aramco policy and Saudi policy, please do.

I would more readily distinguish Aramco from the people who live under the Saudi regime, which was installed by outside forces. The country is not just it's government.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#69

Post by kawsper »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #26

As a German, what amazes me, it seems like many people in England are on a water flatrate, as far as I understand it. No one (?) in Germany is.

That surprised me too.

Flatrate is the default, but you can get a metered water connection installed if you want, and it is often cheaper than the flatrate.

Re: How can England possibly be running out of water?

#70

Post by actionfromafar »

TomasBM wrote: post #50
rhubarbtree wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too right, this is why I have switched to green hydrogen for my household heating. Sure, for now I’ve had to jerry-rig a hydrogen storage tank in my back yard and I’m piping the stuff over the roof, but I’m sure the govt will catch up soon. I’ve converted my car to run on renewable wood pellets, stop moaning start fixing. It’s all about individual choice, the oil companies are simply responding to demand. My next ste…

Sounds like real-life Factorio.

Sounds like satire Factorio. Maybe that is Factorio.
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