England needs more hosepipe bans and smart water meters

England faces enormous shortages of future water and needs a “continuous and sustained effort” to reduce demand, including more deputy prohibitions and “intelligent” water meters, warns the environment.

The guard dog says that without dramatic action, England, which uses 14 billion liters of water per day, will have a daily shortage of more than six billion liters by 2055.

It indicates that more houses will need meters indicating the amount of water used in real time and in future prices may have to increase when the supplies are tight.

The warning has come with droughts already declared in Yorkshire and in northwest England this year after what the Met Office dit is the warmest and driest spring in addition to half a century.

The EA has warned in its national annual report for water resources. He said that 5 billion liters would be necessary to provide the public and an additional 1 billion for agriculture and energy users.

The EA said that customers in England must reduce their water consumption by 2.5 billion liters per day by 2055, compared to an average of around 140 liters per person per day to 110 liters per day.

He warns that future economic growth will probably be compromised as water becomes rarer and has already stressed how water shortages in parts of Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk have limited housing and commercial growth.

Alan Lovell, the president of the EA, told the BBC that he would like to see the water companies use more restrictions such as the prohibitions of hosepipe when there are droughts to “bring home to the people whom the amount of water they use makes a difference”.

The EA highlights the growing population of England as a key engine of the deficit. The water companies expect it to increase by 8 million people by 2055.

At the same time, climate change changes weather conditions, creating new challenges for water supply.

The EA says that England – like the rest of the United Kingdom – already knows warmer, weaker winters and warmer and drier summers. It expects the trend to become more pronounced and warns against more intense precipitation events, creating the potential for a greater incidence of drought and floods.

Another key factor is the need to reduce the quantity of water taken – or “abstract” – by water companies and other users of rivers in England, the report said.

Exaggerated risks destroying certain rivers, in particular the fragile ecosystems of the country’s chalk flows, said Mr. Lovell.

“He could finally see the disappearance of these rivers to a measure where they will never return in the same form,” he told the BBC.

Adding to pressures on supply is the fact that water companies plan to considerably increase their resilience to drought. By 2040, they aim to cope with the type of drought that you expect once every 500 years.

Professor Hannah Cloke, hydrologist at Reading University, believes that we have to change our attitude towards water.

“We really don’t like water,” she said. “We have to think about it as a really, really precious resource.

“Everyone should take care of the water and keep it and think about what they do when they turn on the tap and when they choose not to do it.”

All the people involved in the water industry, including domestic customers, will have to play a role in meeting the deficit, says EA.

He says it is “vital” that water companies hold their promise to reduce the quantity of water fleeing from their pipes by half by 2050 compared to the levels of 2017-2018. This should save about 900 m liters per day.

New infrastructure will also play a role. Last year, water companies received the green light by OFWAT, the organization that oversees the water industry, to invest billions of pounds in ten new tanks and two desalination factories as well as pipelines and other equipment to allow more water to be transferred between the regions.

The objective is to create a “water grid” in the southern half of England, said Bob Taylor, CEO of Portsmouth Water.

“We also plan to use rivers, canals and other existing means to transfer water from the areas where it is abundant in the United Kingdom to the southeast and east of the country where it is less abundant,” said Taylor.

These new investments should ultimately provide an additional 1.7 billion liters per day, the EA report calculates. But the first reservoir will not be finished before the end of this decade and the program should only be finished in the early 2040s.

2.5 billion additional liters per day will have to find by reducing customer demand, including national customers, says EA. And, due to the delays in delivery of the new infrastructure, up to 80% of the deficit must be encountered by customers using less water.

In addition to water companies that change customers to the type of intelligent meter and the variable prices already observed in the electricity industry, EA requests the government to strengthen construction regulations on the use of new houses water and to consider minimum standards for the efficiency of product water.

The EA report highlights the rapid growth in the number of data centers in England as an area of ​​growing industrial demand for water.

PIP Squire, responsible for sustainability in ARK data centers, says that water companies must be much clearer with industrial customers on the quantity of water they have and the resilience of supply.

“We must know what are the constraints so that we can design the system,” said Squire. “We need energy, we need fiber optic connections, but we can build data centers that do not use water. They just cost more to work.”