£500m Thames Water desalination plant has provided just seven days’ water over 15 years | Thames Water

The London desalination plant has cost more than half a billion books since 2010 and has only worked five times, offering 7.2 billion drinking water, about seven days of the typical London daily demand. Now Thames Water plans a new 500 million pounds sterling project to fight drought in the capital.

The Gateway Thames Desalination plant in Beckton, built for 270 million pounds sterling and now largely upset, has accumulated about 200 million pounds sterling of debt interest, around 45 million pounds sterling in inactive interview and approximately 3 million pounds sterling in operating costs, according to Thame figures. This puts the bill for life at around 518 million pounds sterling, about 7p for each liter that the plant has ever produced, 28 times more than customers generally pay for their water.

Thames Water now plans to build a new drought resilience regime on the Thames at an estimated cost between £ 359 and 535 million pounds sterling which will be paid by customers.

The Teddington Directton River (TDRA) abstraction program would eliminate river water from Teddington, pump it to Lee Valley tanks in northern London and replace it with effluents treated by Mogden listening works in western London.

A figure in the senior water industry was frank: “Father Thames will be hit because you withdraw clean water and put more dirty water. They cannot say this. If this was not the case, why would they not simply take water from wastewater treatment work, would put it in treatment and use it for drinking water? ”

Beckton’s desalination plant is not a clean solution. It is with high energy intensity, produced with brine and discharge of effluents containing chlorine, chloroform and bromoform – disinfectant by -products – in the Thames. Other flows of waste are “chemically neutralized” before being mixed with outings of neighboring Beckton sewers and released in the river.

Thames Water claims that the factory is “not currently available” due to the “work related to the security of tanks”, essential maintenance and because it awaits the inspection of drinking water for the inspection of new membranes with inverted osmosis.

However, according to official documents, the factory has been assaulted big problems. Repeated chemical leaks have forced workers to wear protective chemical combinations to enter certain parts of the site and that the Thames water admitted that system failures have “prevented the factory from operating in progress due to health and safety problems”.

Improvements are underway, in order to obtain 50 m liters of water per day [Ml/d] At the end of the current five -year investment cycle and “75 ml / d during the periods of drought” by 2031, according to documents from the Water Society.

A spokesperson for Thames Water said that the gateway desalination plant is designed to provide up to 5% of the London supply “during very dry conditions”, with decisions on operation according to long-term forecasts and storage levels. Once the safety work and the maintenance are completed, it will be “in accordance with our water resources management plan”.

The TDRA is “necessary in addition to the factory as well as our significant investment in leaks and work to reduce the demand for water through the measure,” said the spokesperson. In 2023-24, Thames Water lost 570.4 million liters per day through leaks.

The TDRA program would guarantee supplies for millions by providing up to 75 m of liters per day during drought by pumping water from the Thames upstream of Teddington Weir in the Lee Valley tanks. This would be replaced by “clean recycled water” from wastewater treatment, he said. “Communities have our absolute assurance that no untreated wastewater will enter the river … It is physically impossible by design,” said Thames Water.

“The project will not go ahead without demonstrating to the Environment Agency that water is safe to return to the river,” added the spokesperson.

During a meeting last year with the deputy Munira Wilson, whose district of Twickenham would house the TDRA, the director general of Thames Water, Chris Weston, admitted the desalination plant, which was originally advanced to provide around 100 m liters of water per day, had been used only a touch of moments and said it was because “it did not work as we expected.”

Wilson said, “Thames Water told us that their Teddington program is the” best value “option. But it is still another example of the Water Thames which does not invest in essential elements, while pouring millions of books of money from invoices in short -term corrections which do nothing other than producing new assets for the company to borrow.

“This rightly leaves the facilants and residents to ask why they should finance another white elephant that could harm our precious river and the health of people for a very limited gain. With the failures of Thames Water exposed to everyone, it is high time that the government has cleaned our water sector once and for all. ”

Dr. Janina Gray de Wildfish said: “Desalination is not a miracle solution, but the alternatives offered are not either. We must end routine exploitation of rivers and groundwater. The toxic mixture of drought on the already stressed river systems pushes emblematic species like the endangered Atlantic salmon.”

Without action to guarantee water resources, England faces a deficit of 5 billion liters per day for public water supply by 2055 – and an additional deficit of 1 billion liters per day for the larger economy – according to Defra. Half of the 5 billion liters scheduled per day are in southeast England.

A DEFRA spokesperson said: “The pressure on our water system soars. This government is committed to increasing our water supply while protecting the environment and public health. To effectively guarantee water supply, we need more water recycling projects such as TDRA, combined with new tanks.