Thames Water court case shows there are alternatives to massive infrastructure | Phillip Inman

BThe ritin lacks water, we are told. Soon there will be fire covers, prohibiting people from lighting their taps, as happened in Italy. The Pip stands grow on the side of the dried up roads where trees were formerly.

The rivers will direct the dry and rural communities will begin to dig well in response to an apocalypse of water intended to arrive with the kind authorization of the devastating effect of climate change.

Water companies argue that significant investments are necessary to deal with meteorological changes, these funds mainly channeled in the construction of new massive infrastructure.

They are happy to do the work, as long as payment is billed directly to customers.

This is what we could call the HS2 error. Except that rather than building a high -speed line to increase rail capacity between London and Birmingham when other much less sexy options were available at a lower cost, we find ourselves agreeing to build tanks as high as high -rise buildings.

Above all, assets increase the balance sheets of private water companies, because although the Billpayers have financed the projects, the shareholders will hold the new infrastructure.

Last week, a group of experts took Thames Water before the courts to try to persuade a judge that an alternative to a reservoir, near Abingdon in Oxfordshire, is not only possible, but presents a much more sustainable and cheaper option for customers,, And that it must be tested in a public inquiry.

At the heart of the argument is a dispute on how to manage the water resources of Great Britain, activists urging the distance from Major projects To something more hummdrum, allowing money to be spent instead to clean the polluted rivers first by Thames Water et al.

However, what the Thames and his consulting friends seem to want, like so many people in the game of infrastructure, is a building that you can see from space.

Nine new tanks are at the heart of this plan and some will have walls to hold in the water which are the height of the average house. The reservoir intended to replace the farmer’s fields near Abingdon will have walls 25 meters high.

They are intended in the south and east of England, where the number of populations increases and dry summers burn the earth.

Politicians have supported the plans, and it is easy to understand why. Great Britain has failed to build tanks in the past 40 years, and who does not like a nice lake to watch?

The tanks are cheap and easy to build when located in a valley and the river that crosses it is capped at one end. The soil should be waterproof, which generally means that clay is underwater.

Unfortunately in Abingdon, there is what can only be described as a puddle of clay, which is why the tank must sit on the top, with gratge-celle walls all around. A tank provided for Lincolnshire will also have 13 meters walls because the clay layer is so thin.

A large part of the south is dominated by chalk and gravel, it is therefore not suitable for tanks. Land which has clay on which has already been built – London, for example.

What the South boasts is chalk and underground aquifers. Anti-reservoir activists say that this water aquifer, and that of the slow lower scope of the rivers which feed the Thames, like the LEA, can be extracted without environmental prejudice.

The problem for the CPRE, formerly the Protection Council of Rural England, and the Saferwaters campaign group, which support the campaign, is that Thames Water works with the grain of people’s emotions. Good reservoirs, aquifers and extraction of the bad river.

Climate change, however, means humid winters and drier summers. Thus, the aquifers fill up in winter and undergo little evaporation in summer, while the tanks are undergoing huge losses during hot days, especially when the new ones have to pump the water from neighboring rivers, are relatively shallow and with a large area.

Thames Water is based on forecasts that show that 2 million more people will live in London and the Southeast by 2050, and taking into account the exhaustion of other sources of water in climate change, it will have to find more than 1 billion additional water each day.

The figures of the Environment Agency, however, show a sharp decline in the use of water, a large part of it linked to the switch of oil, gas and charcoal power plants with renewable energies such as solar energy. Again, we may have an attachment to old -fashioned means to generate energy, but renewable energies have many advantages, including the use of water.

Another arrow in activists’ quiver concerns leaks. Why, ask them, is the Thames invited to reduce its leakage rate from 50% to 11.4% by 2050 when water suppliers in Germany have already reduced the rate to around 7%?

The tanks let the Thames take down. The company should spend money to connect leaks and prevent wastewater from spitting in rivers. Instead, it is requested to embark on projects paid by customers who strengthen its asset base. What does not want to like from the point of view of the Water Company?

The government should be more skeptical. There is a price to pay and the voters will not be nice when the higher bills will go through their mailbox.