ActewAGL is a strange organisation. It has been set up on business principles, yet it must be one of the few businesses on earth that urged people NOT to consume its product.
It actively campaigns for us to use LESS water, when every other business is saying, “”buy, buy, buy” – more cars, more Mars bars, more Coke etc.
After weeks of no rain and now a deluge in which every creek and banker ran and dams filled over top is ActewAGL being alarmist in saying we’ll all be “rooned” if we keep consuming its product? Surely, in a land of drought and flooding rains we can always expect rain in God’s good time and not have to worry. Surely ActewAGL should be out there flogging its wares to make more profit for the ACT Government, for us. Isn’t that what corporatisation is all about.
Well, ActewAGL doesn’t sell water.
Nature has the water cycle. Water does not get consumed like petrol where the molecules get pulled apart in a chemical reaction with a release of energy. The H2O says the same – but nasty bits get added to it by consumers – or users – which have to be taken out again before the water can be reused. So ActewAGL does not sell water, it sells the treatment of water and the storage of it, so clean water is available at the turn of a tap.
And it is the storage that concerns ActewAGL.
At present the ACT (and for water purposes that includes Queanbeyan) has four dams to supply its water: Cotter, Corin and Bendora in the Cotter River catchment and Googong in the Queanbeyan River catchment.
Cotter is hardly ever used. Its water quality is as good as Bendora and Corin and better than Googong, but the water has to be pumped to the city. When it was built in 1912 (it height was increased in 1951) the ease of construction at that site outweighed the pumping cost. Bendora and Corin are more hi-tech dams in more difficult construction sites and they are the preferred source for ACT water on two counts: they are high up so can gravity feed to the water treatment plant at Mount Stromlo without the cost of pumping and the water quality in the largely wilderness Cotter catchment is so good that it needs little treatment, thus cutting costs.
The big dry this January, however, has resulted in Corin being less than 50 per cent full and Bendora at 75 per cent. So we have had to draw on water from Googong. This water, according to the general manager of water at ActewAGL, Wayne Harris, costs about 10 times the amount of Cotter catchment water to get to Canberra and Queanbeyan taps. The Googong catchment includes farmland and small townships so the water requires greater treating. Googong water also has to be pumped (at greater cost) to its treatment site.
This is one reason ActewAGL would like to see more water conservation – so we do not have to draw on expensive Googong water, even though it is 60 per cent of our stored water.
The other reason is that ActewAGL would like to put off the day when we have to build a fifth dam to ensure water supply without restrictions in the ACT. A new dam would cost about $100 million. It will add significantly to average water costs throughout Canberra even if it is only needed for a few additional houses.
For the past decade ActewAGL has been using price signals and education to reduce water consumption.
Before the early 1990s we got a fixed allowance of 445 kilolitres and paid excess beyond that. Then we got a connection fee and an allowance at a cheap rate after which water was paid at a higher rate. But you paid for every drop.
We now pay 40 cents for the first 225 kilolitres and 94 cents thereafter. That’s why your fourth-quarter bill often looks so high.
The 225-kilolitre cheap allowance will slowly be cut to 175 kilolitres, which is the estimated minimum indoor usage below which a price signal will not work. Harris says it is an inelastic demand – people will use that much water almost irrespective of the price.
The price signal has been working. Average household consumption has fallen from above 400 kilolitres in the late 1980s to 257 kilolitres in 199-2000. That is down to indoor technology – double flushing toilets and more efficient washing machines and dishwashers and Canberra’s maturing gardens. The soft, green, children-friendly, water-hungry gardens of the 1970s are giving way to pergolas, paving, rock gardens, extensions, automatic sprinklers and the like.
And Canberra has postponed the construction of a new dam.
The question is whether all the big savings have been made and that we might have to increase storage or face restrictions. A new dam might go on the Naas River or between Corin and Bendora. (Incidentally, Googong was chosen in preference to those sites in the 1970s because its catchment got rain mainly from the east, whereas the Cotter catchment get the westerly rain, so Googong added to diversity of rain source and hence increased security of overall storage.
Another interim possibility for the future would be to take water from large buildings, treat it, store it and put it into the mains.
Individual home tanks are not a goer. They pose health risks so cannot be connected to the mains. Other than drip feeding gardens and a drinking tap they require pumps and the cost of the tank is disproportionate so might be greenhouse counter-productive. Water defies standard market logic and is best provided under communal co-operation by an authority that does not chant the market mantra of consume more now.