Does Sydney need a desalination plant?
Sydney in Australia, NSW, has just come out of a long period of drought in which the dams that supply Sydney dropped to 34% of total storage ability. The Kurnell Desalination Plant was picked as a long term solution to Sydney’s on going fresh water crisis The plant will use reverse osmosis filtration membranes to remove salt from seawater and will be powered using 100 percent renewable energy; supplied to the national power grid from the Capital Wind Farm at Bungendore, NSW. It is intended to supply up to 15% of the drinking water supply to Sydney, the Illawarra and the Blue Mountains. It is expected that the plant will be able to generate 250 megalitres of water every day (91 gigalitres a year), with the possibility of scaling up to 500 megalitres in the future if needed (182 gigalitres a year), as the pipes and infrastructure will be scaled to allow this. The total cost of all this, including fees is around 2 billion dollars.
